Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

She felt that husbands used women to rape or as confidants for the release of their suffering boys. She found it vertiginous and a bit nauseating.

“Yes,” she said coldly, “What is it?”

“I just want to tell you something that happened...I think I saw my brother-one of them when I was leaving for the airport.”

“The one who beat up on your face when I first met you.”

“Yeah. Maybe. It’s nothing. It is just on my mind.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No, just saw him from a distance.”

Hanging up, he got dressed and, paintbrush in hand, he returned to his dreams: dreams of people in movements imitated from their fathers and forefathers-those in traditional marriages and traditional jobs who were in their movements as perfunctory and dead as noodle workers. He swept color on his canvas. He made imagined forms of those who had not, in their early childhood been maimed in this mechanical apparatus called family. For selfish reasons, like those tiny salamanders clinging to windows during a storm, he thought that he should spend time with Porn, know her in more detail, listen to her, and understand. In part he was able to click into that tender inquisitive probing and non-judgmental listening called empathy, but the thing that clicked his brainwaves in this circuitry was often selfish. He knew that he, his wife, and his Porn were all maimed ones. They were indeed a family. They were part of him and he did not want to lose them. Both brought him pleasurable respites from himself who was often attuned to the pain that was rife in all things. When Porn came home he went to her. He asked how her day was. He listened to her complaints. He paused and waited. He understood her isolation. Still he did not promise to take her to New York.

Impermanence was in all things. Galaxies collided or were pulled into joint oval orbits. Planets were sucked into those suns in the realignment. The suns themselves eventually flared up into supernovas consuming all planetary bodies orbiting their realm and died. Long ago while the senator was in his first year of law school his sister had become one of the hundred women on a given day that sought to get traveler’s visas at the German Embassy escorted by their boyfriends so as to begin a departure that would keep them in exile. His parents were now beginning to act the parts of invalids and leeches. To his parents he had failed them by being divorced and not having children that would have fostered the illusion of continuum. They also thought he had failed them by not inviting them into his home. The result was a continual stream of their calls on his mobile telephone where the mother and father diagnosed themselves and each other, listing all symptoms and proposing materialistic requests and more time together that would alleviate or distract their mental and physical suffering. Women whom he had thought of as having permanent relationships gained new perspectives from the intake of new information. They also gained more immediate and dominant feelings engendered by newer relationships. They went on and became something different without any way of relating back since, like the expanding universe, it all needed to go forward. With aging parents and relationships awry came the growing daily awareness of the limits of his lifespan making him all the more glutinous to have money, status, and women who could produce for him children. But with each year of impermanence his identity of himself fell on its own weight like a black hole and he did not know who he was. The loving neediness of wanting that special woman who would take care of his sexual needs, give him children, and not extort him of finances with a divorce grated against him stridently. There was no security against another mishap especially at his present age of forty when his physical attributes were diminishing and a woman would not be likely to marry him for how he made her feel.

Jatupon wanted to be an aristocratic bum. He wanted to commune with inner voices within himself and to have the relationship of green blades of grass firmly poking into the crevices of his toes when he ran about barefoot in a park. He wanted to return to that state of knowing perfectly what to say when others asked him, at age five, what he wanted to become when he grew up. “I want to become a tickle-man,” he would always tell them and then he would try to tickle them before they tickled him. A decade later, this old long-lost game with Kazem in particular could not be surpassed. He still couldn’t think of a better vocation than a tickle-man.