“Return where?” Jatupon swallowed in larger sips while his head was like a boat swiftly churning its propellers but going nowhere.
“To what we were. Like when we were able to finally afford a restaurant and Mom would come with Kumpee in the taxi and they would slide sacks and boxes of vegetables, rice, and pork that we would put away enthusiastically; or when we ordered a plastic ball from box tops of cereal boxes like the one that we spent months getting...the spacey one with many suction cups...it would stick to about anything when wet; that one Sonkran where we were in the back of a pickup truck with a barrel of water for ammunition, aiming at every moving target. Father had rented a truck to pick up something. I don’t remember what. But then, for some reason, he changed his mind and took us...” They both sank into their father’s rare episodes of kindness and then their minds switched to the pure fun of Songkran chaos where society became freer and fragmented to thoughtless instinctual responses of guerrilla warfare where aiming guns for the open windows of busses and targeting other rival gangs had no consequences.
“I am a man now. I don’t want to hear bullshit about returning back. What good does it do to be sentimental, anyhow? Chance took them and if they are looking down on us it will be with as little concern as when they were alive. As I see it, whether we honor their jars of ashes at the temple or spit on them it doesn’t much matter. Their spirits didn’t keep Kumpee from running off with what he could. Do I want to return back? Back wasn’t any good either; so, no, not really if I were to be honest about it.” Only the high he was experiencing allowed him to be so honest.
Anxieties began to wreak Jatupon’s sensitivities. The rag of a drape hanging against the window in a knot looked like a gigantic condom. There was a huge hole in the wall symbolic of life being a void. His brother was a person whom he was beginning to know well at one moment and a stranger with a strange face reminiscent of an aunt, dreamed or real, the next moment. He thought how odd it was that the whole perspective of someone he had known his whole life was interchanging so randomly with the worst moments being when his brother seemed to have a stone alien countenance.
He let another golden wave hit his tongue. It was like being hit by a wave from an ocean all bitter and suffocating. He began to laugh. He couldn’t help it. Pains and pleasures seemed to him as such an irrelevant and comical absurdity slapping a person around in its inundations. One moment he would be here and happy and then he would be there and miserable. He drank more of the beer and laughed.
“Chug it all down!” repeated his brother.
He thought to himself that here they were—two very young men who had once run freely together through puddles on the streets and yet despite their history (regardless of it not being a particularly close relationship) Suthep and all that should seem him was tenuous and frothy when it should be solid in his memory. Staring at him for a couple seconds, somehow he couldn’t believe that someone who said “Chug it all down” was his benefactor. He looked down. As he did so, he sensed that the bubbles were increasing in his can of beer. The mosquito, that had been folded, spread out its large mass once it climbed out of the beer can.
“I don’t want to be lectured to by you,” said Jatupon in his mind to the mosquito. “I might want an education but not some garbled ideas of an insect created by my own inebriated brain.”
“You get what you pay for. These opportunities of hearing me on my soapbox is as much truth as any noodle worker will be exposed to.”
“I know you are horrible but I don’t mind it anymore. I’m not scared of it anymore. I’m used to it. If I can’t get rid of you, at least you will no longer upset me.”