Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

Born in boredom and anguish at seeing snow fall while doing her dishes in front of the kitchen window, delivered meals, disposable plates, and throw-away silverware of plastic came into being. They had seemed at first to her the perfect tools to minimize discontent. Then she kept the drapes shut at all times to keep from seeing the snow. Still it did not help; and one evening she beat on his locked studio door and screamed to it that she was going to her language class. She hadn’t been there but once following her enrollment.

While she went out with the snow and the wind, Nawin still remained locked away but free in his colors. They flowed in tight brushstrokes of an earthy tone. They were of French-Canadian mannequins performing their perfunctory duties of marriage. A summary setting of a banquet table was under the window. A profuse ochre sunlight poured through the window permeating the scene at the wedding banquet. The table cast a shadow that inundated around the feet of the mannequins like a pool providing the scene with form and volume. However, greatness was in the details and that he was still lacking. He was listening to Thai news from his computer. The anchorman said that Moslems and Hindus were burning houses in one Indian community. Hindus were throwing Moslem children into bonfires, telling them they would meet their deceased fathers. His pastel colors began to have a fiery gray bleakness. He felt great despair. He wondered why in the 3 million years of Australopithecus through the 100,000 years of his species (if his species was to some degree related to Australopithecus) humans had not learned love. They had learned speech and social skills for society to exist but they hadn’t learned love. He wondered if this word was totally empty without substance. Maybe it was a make-believe word to make humans feel better about themselves. He wondered if there was anything outside of human selfishness.

He had once gotten out of noodles—Noodles stirred in a wok or alive, like worms, in a vat. Briefly, he had gotten out of his boyhood assignments of washing bowls in tubs, being the seamstress attaching jasmine flowers into rosaries from a long, thick needle, selling them on the streets in the traffic, and then returning to wash more bowls. There was a time when his aunt had had mercy on him and had come into his life despite the inauspicious marriage that her sister had made. It almost seemed like a dream. Hadn’t she first enrolled him in a Bible School class? Within that class so long ago, from a lost being of himself, had he not taken a paper image of Christ and varnished it onto a piece of wood? Then his aunt let him dabble in education and gain the full thirst on the new taste buds. Neurological responses burgeoned and bifurcated within him. Now this wooden, shiny-faced Christ or the ashes of it were somewhere in a colossal garbage heap with so much Kumpee had coerced them to throw away or sell “to have as savings.” That image of Christ or the conceptualization of it in his head had not spared either himself or it from the trash heap. He was, nonetheless, fond of it. Strangely, Bible school for him had been the initial stage of his education at the temple school. He wished that he had that plaque to keep forever. If he were to have that plaque now it might be precious proof that a young scholar had actually lived.

This part of him was undeniably gone. Gone it was, for he continually slid out of his skin so fully and naturally even though he was rarely cognizant that this continual sliding away from himself was taking place. He was just slumbering as all slumbered. This was life, and unlike a movie, music did not accompany it’s plotless plodding of time. The sliding out of his skin happened every minute of his life and yet there was perhaps some consistency one might isolate as a Jatupon if one were to imagine such a being when Buddhism stipulated that the self was nothing but a delusion. Whenever he saw an emaciated dog wadded into itself like crumbled trash or sprawled out onto the pavement as if dead he would always say, “poor baby dog.” It was a long embedded sensitivity that he had developed in Ayuttaya from early boyhood. In Bangkok where they seemed even more pathetic, the sensitivity was exacerbated and he repeated this phrase over and over again no different than when he was six years old. This was surely proof of a bit of a consistent self. Friends always went away after they learned, shared, or enjoyed the company of a given person for they needed to evolve to the next level and forget previous levels. However, one surely did not lose himself completely. He did not know.

Still he was changing and within the darkness that was subjugating him into doziness a new embedded consistency was formulating. His mind kept flitting back to the thought of this girl, Noppawan, and his imaginative curiosity invented a mansion where she no doubt resided. He could imagine her governess and feel how contained and alone she might be within a rigid schedule of private teachers and tutors. He imagined her accompanied by servants while her continually busy parents remained remote and detached from her life.

He was as happy to be returning to his sordid smelling cell as that time when he had returned from the fair. With hairnet as a tail in his back pocket, his eyes gleamed of hope, and curiosity brewed about Noppawan. Change also marked the life of Suthep, who was sitting on two bags of his clothes, latent with the night, when Jatupon approached the apartment building.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Suthep was smoking near a tree.

“I got an apartment. I’m about ready to leave. I thought I’d tell you goodbye but maybe get you to help me with a bag if you don’t mind.”

“You’re leaving?” He felt nonplused. His senses tingled and throbbed in confusion like the onslaught of the mosquito when drugs had conjured illusions and excavated buried, opaque truths. “If you want to leave us, why were we all working together earlier today?”

“For old time’s sake. I’m not leaving completely—just from time to time when I’m tired and want to be able to sleep without having to come all the way back here.”