“How disgusting! Are you going to fart all the way up there?”
“Where is your apartment?” asked Jatupon, anxious that the subject be changed.
“You need to have a doctor check you out with all that farting you do” said Suthep. He was enjoying Jatupon’s embarrassment. “A fart doctor,” he said. They both laughed. They began walking down the soi to the main street. Suthep smoked and coughed. His face cringed and then he spat out some mucus in front of a 7-11. He buried it with the sole of his sandal. They began walking again. Jatupon was feeling even more reluctant to experience change and this reluctance spoke to him in the scraping shuffle of their talking sandals. Jatupon did not know what his brother knew and his mouth opened a couple times as if wanting to ask him. Still, he could not speak such things.
“How much is your rent?” he asked at last as the two of them waited for a period of minutes for a bus. He was anxious to wedge them out of the coffins that buried each of them separately into themselves.
Only words and actions were his crowbar.
“Just a thousand” Suthep grumbled. But from there the journey was a wordless void.
Before they arrived at the smaller cell Suthep bought a couple cartons of beer from a convenience store and the two of them sank into themselves within the barren room. Exhaustion stung them and yet both, wishing to find a chamber of themselves not mandated by work and sleep, let the liquor and marijuana smoke toss about their beings—beings that were sprawled on pillows on the tileless wooden floor.
Suthep stared at him so directly for a period of seconds with a face that looked like his aunt when she had peered out at him from her glasses. His stare seemed incessant and those eyes burned his face that blushed from the worry of what the stare and the invitation to visit here all meant. His aunt’s stare through her glasses had long ago been like a version of the sanphraphun, the dollhouse of the spirits that was often placed in front of businesses and residences. At such sanphraphuns Thais put down plates of food and lit incense that would carry to the gods their wishes. She had been his guardian spirit in a sanphraphun of those glasses and yet she had abandoned him. Like the aunt, Suthep’s eyes were probing. In the smoke of the cannabis he too seemed like a spirit. Suthep’s gaze attempted to measure the traces of manhood that were in the youngest brother. They attempted to not be repulsed by the boy, the victim, that still surfaced. Suthep noticed that even in the masculine activity of beer drinking Jatupon sipped the beer in little suctions like the infant to its bottle.
“Go ahead, little man, swallow as much as you can in one gulp.”
“Why?”