Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

He too wanted to stop thinking and he wished that his thoughts could be intruded with conversation. “I just mean that I’m nobody important. I paint a little. I’m going to Montreal for that reason.” The taxi driver was reticent. “Do you have many hours left driving today?” Nawin asked him. Still there was no answer. He threw the cigarette out of the opened window. “Do you want a stick of gum,” he asked the girl.

“I have a tick tack in my mouth now but I’ll take your gum and save it for later. You might not offer it again.” She giggled and he smiled at her with the tightness of his closed lips. She had lost her animal, and there she was as his seductress. He kissed her and returned the headphones over his ears. The savory taste of her mouth was in him.

Chapter 2

The acceleration that took them out of Huamark and through other adjacent sections of the city eventually led them to her area. He did not remember the name of it: Bangkae, Bangplad, Bang-something. He paid little attention to what his mistress said. Her voice often seemed the strident spluttering of burning fuel in an engine that couldn’t produce motion. King Ramkhamhaeng was a bygone entity. As soon as his model picked up some of her things that she had forgotten to bring with her the previous day and they had some breakfast, then Thailand would be a thing of the past too. For how long he didn’t know. He was married but it was one signature on many sheets of paper. The significance of spilled ink could not be read unless, like many superstitious Thais, he were to seek a fortuneteller-mendicant sitting on a sheet or straw mat on a sidewalk or in a park.

Noppawan had her chance to go with him. He had asked repeatedly. He had tacitly exhorted (mostly with his eyes) but she had refused him. Maybe she needed him to command her presence. Maybe in this nebulousness of strong selfishness and altruism called a personal relationship, so immediate and personal like finding oneself enveloped in smoking and fiery dust, she needed constant reminders that he cared about her more than any other entity selfishly and altruistically. That would be the woman in her if there were such a woman.

He tried to contemplate what love was like for normal people. It was surely a dust storm one invented in one’s mind to escape loneliness but then it became intertwined in more neediness and consciousness of the other’s feelings and thoughts so as not to be vanquished to aloneness. An individual who was able to overcome the grief of the loss of dopamine in the ephemeral and moribund high of being in love would cling to his former pleasure-inducer as a source of meaning in life’s vicissitudes. He and Noppawan had done the same but they were less like individuals finding themselves separately cast onto lifeboats in an ocean of random waves for they found oceans of thoughts within themselves that seemed more navigable to solid chunks of reality. They needed each other less; or so he thought.

Thai women generally had obsequious crying bouts in their rafts, but Noppawan, he argued, was not a woman. She was female without womanity. She was a female who advocated overcoming petty human existence for a love of ideals, compassion, and the attempts at understanding the human predicament. He couldn’t see into the future to know if he would be returning to Thailand anytime soon to be peered at through his wife’s thick dark framed glasses. At present there were only the wills of three individuals cowardly seeking meaning for themselves in a unit. There were only these socialized wills rolling along on a road in marginal darkness under the specious assumption that there really was a destination. The sensory input of traditional Thai music was coming to them from the front and back speakers of the car that was their confinement. The radio music, no matter if interpreted as harmonious or strident by the three individuals, was a levee helping to block their pervasive inundation of self-absorbing, mordant thoughts and reminded them (the patriot and the pending expatriates) of their commonality as Thais.

They passed a mall where he and Porn had gone shopping a month earlier. That day they had spent together there was the levity of the stroll and the shiny flash of credit cards in this Thai way of forgetting one’s impoverished roots. Feeling on top of the world, he comported the male gesture of having one arm clutching the other one behind his back. It was a gesture of affluence in the stroll of the shopper’s quest. At least twice when he encountered friends of his from Silpakorn Art University with bags in their hands he would talk to them for a half hour and somewhere into the talk he used another male gesture of affluence. He would slip a foot from a sandal and then slap it onto the floor loud as a firecracker. The sandal would hit the floor like a hand slapping against an impoverished peasant.

They stopped in an alley smaller than a side street called a “soi.” It was in between many Mom and Pop businesses and there, crowded within, was her apartment. He knew rooms like this well. They were rented out for fifteen or twenty dollars a month (600 or 700 baht), barren, hot, and unventilated as an attic. When she had gone in to get her bags he felt less lonely to be momentarily rid of her. Even now at age 26 but with thoughts at certain moments suffering and dragging like a man of 50, there was just himself, the real unit of one, and delude himself all he pleased he knew that he could not find anyone more significant than that. The only thing next to his heart, in the pocket of his shirt, were the slides of his art depicting the naked and dejected whores of Patpong that had ejaculated him into fame and puffed up a latent ego in himself that thought that he was a higher being than other Thais. He was keeping them there that day because he wanted to momentarily hand them over to airport authorities so they would not be harmed in airport security. When she returned with an added bag that the taxi driver plunked into the trunk the two men smiled at her and she smiled back. After all, Thailand was the land of smiles and every infant understood the advantages of smiling. To bypass his surly temperament and increase friendly relations, Nawin offered more breath fresheners or chewing gum for everyone. No Thai would refuse such friendly gestures and the two of them took from his hand greedily like tamed birds. Then he began his old contemplation of why 2 was greater than 1 or why 3 was greater than 2. It was an old argument of his wife. The first time she posed it to him they both were 16 years old. He had made the mistake of asking her to a dance. “Why do two things coming in close proximity to each other have greater value?” she asked. His only response had been “A le nah?” meaning “What did you say?” Neither one of them went to the dance but straight to their bedrooms and their sullen thoughts.

Porn was, according to his thinking, an “all right whore.” She didn’t cause him any problems at all and it was for this reason that he carried her along with him as a personification of his intellectual decadence thereby increasing public intrigue with him. She was the pretty doll he could swing about as a reminder of his one-man school of art. He, Nawin Biadklang, could flaunt her around as the premier example of the dark vision in his mind and the sexual slavery of his nation all meshed together. He would have to draw a lot in Montreal and sell everything he painted to pay for any expenses the scholarship would not cover. She preferred her title of model. He was not so heartless to deny her this euphemism. She successfully relieved him of the tension of his body and to be emitted of it like a squeezed tangerine in such a good rhythmic fingering would well compensate for the stress level of having to spend so much time with her. He desired her a lot of the time so by most accounts of love he did truly love her. Foremost, Noppawan did not object to her. Matter of fact, she wanted Porn to relieve him. She wanted him squeezed. She wanted the pus squished from his brain without having to get dirty. She wanted to continuously wear the glasses that caged her tepid orbs and to not succumb them to rapturous non-Buddhist primal yearnings. She did not care to dodge the aloneness of her thoughts through a rapturous delusion that she was one partial being made whole in sex and love. And yet by her account she did not want to mandate his awareness. It was only by tripping on shadows and feeling vapid equanimity that came after having absurdly given oneself over so entirely to the sensation of pulling on one’s genitalia that a man actually knew anything.