Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

“If I stay much longer,” she said an hour later, “they will start looking for me-or at least the servants will. I usually only run away on Saturdays and Sundays. I don’t like missing too much school.”

He knew what he had suspected on their first meeting: that her rebellion was far larger and more personal than anything he had witnessed before. She kept mostly to intangible subjects like religion because her repugnance toward religion had been easier for her to communicate. He felt her rebellion. It stood out like a Long Necked Karen (the native Burmese people living in Chaing Mai who had the tradition of distorting the growth of their necks). He felt her rebellion and it was a novelty for him. It intrigued him and it felt wholly real. He thought, in Thailand one gave the “wei” to Buddhist statues, stupas, shrines, temples, and people who were older and of higher classes if such individuals exerted a powerful role over him; and yet one did this not understanding why it was done. It occurred to him that it was all ludicrous in a way and not just limited to Thai customs. How could she or anyone communicate the exact items that they were rebelling against? Rebellion was seen in the eyes but it could not be readily explained and in ways it went contrary to nature and the social response. Greed and aggression were entrenched in the survival of a being and lay latent but active within every cell but those cells were sugar coated with that cloying substance of Thailand, the land of smiles.

As they paddled back she looked up at the puffy whiff of clouds above her and said, “This is real. Relaxing and being part of the clouds and the second, attaching to the mystery of it all . . . the universe and time-that is the only thing that makes sense, don’t you think?” He smiled and nodded his head in pleasure. Yes, this was certainly better than talking to the mosquito. How strange they were. Their serious probing of life and their awareness of the geyser of unique thoughts that erupted in them certainly didn’t seem Thai. A typical urban Thai yearned to languish if not extinguish himself or herself in strolls in a shopping mall, a movie, a video game, laughter, cellular telephones, beer, and comic books. Jatupon did pursue the pejorative in comic books as most Thai males from five to fifty and the two of them were pursuing their quest of leisure as lazily as the best of Thais; still to him they seemed so different from all others.

She asked about his parents and was saddened to hear of their tragedy. She probed into it further in interest and then backed away when she saw his pain. Kindness and empathy illuminated her countenance. She tried to mitigate his pain by becoming absorbed in her own that she pursued philosophically exempt of emotionalism. “My parents are always moving around in the future. Ambition moves them around like the places on a board game of chess-or draughts played by motorcycle taxi drivers when they wait-with the pop bottle caps-have you seen them?” He was startled by how her ideas had such confluence with his own. She was an augmentation of his own thoughts.

They left the park reluctantly. She did not want to leave at all without assurances and he offered them. He told her that his brother was not a violent person. He said that Kazem sometimes belted him when he really deserved it but that there were plenty of times he deserved it and yet his brother wouldn’t touch him. She seemed to believe his assurances and went away.

As she vanished from his senses his empty hollow mind was filled with images of half-headed beings, twisted skeletons, rigid corpses like old ochre vases, the naked man and the woman floating in their formaldehyde glass coffins with their fronts carved out for the display of their entrails, the fetuses and their placentas, one child that had such a gigantic head and another one that had been born like a solid never feeling motion. These images attacked his consciousness. It seemed to him that the world was a loveless and ceaseless factory that replicated over and over again manufacturing slightly damaged and terribly damaged products with impunity. He paid his two baht to the lady in the glassless window and went into the public bathroom. He wept for those who had deserved better than this. Then his weeping poured into himself. He knew that after what he saw he should not want anything more from his life than the noodles that sustained him and yet he did. He knew he should not want a more purified love than what Kazem extended to him and yet he nonetheless did.

The hours of that spring day came and went indistinguishably from other seasons, and all days were clones with stoic dispositions. His majesty, King Rama IX, a few hours earlier, had changed the seasonable robes of the Emerald Buddha like a girl dressing a doll. He then presided over the plowing ceremony with its blessings to the rice goddess; and watched one cow predict the agricultural future of the nation from its bovine appetites—the cow wandering over to preferred troughs filled with anything from brandy to barley, beans and rice, or just plain water—instinctively consuming something or another interpreted as conditions prosperous or economically disparaging.

Further into the heart of the city, Suthep slept removed from the mooing of omniscient cows in Sanam Luang which stood on an island of dirt where kites had flown surrounded by inundating dark black exhaust fumes and fast, obnoxious wheeled beasts, honking their loud voices as they passed each other. Tucked in his smaller cell he rode the REM of being. He dreamed he was on a motorcycle leaving his uncomfortably tight partial apartment that was comfortably free of brothers and awkward moments of catching them together. Hired to cater his fried rice with chicken he cooked it, put it on paper plates, and sealed the plates with plastic wrap. Then he put them in baskets on opposite sides of a bamboo pole. Balancing the pole of baskets on his back, he drove to a government building. Why the banquet only had that one dish of “kow pat” (fried rice) was a point that the dream did not address. Also the street names were not those of the Dusit area but those of central Bangkok. As he came near the building , a limousine hit him and hurried off. Blood poured from the orifice of his face. There was nothing but gray and a firm belief he would die. The ambulance drivers, none of whom were paramedics, came to pillage him of his wallet and watch. He got up, Thai boxed them for his things, and realized as they ran from him in fright that he was as ethereal as a cloud. And then his parents came out of nothingness and he told them that they needed to go away since he (ghost or man) was now a free agent and did not need them any longer. As he got back on his motorcycle someone knocked on the door.

He woke up but his brain was retarded in an earlier being. As he heard the knocking he imagined that Jatupon was lying beside him and listening to his scurrying feet move toward the door. So many years they had slept in the same room. They had slept side by side until a few years ago. Did he love his brother so much that he would wake up with him skirting around in his dreams? Maybe he did since the habit of being with him was long. The youngest sibling was so much of his past and he had been accustomed to him without major aversion. The habit of being with someone without major repugnance was indeed the only thing that constituted fraternal love; and yet, little as it might be, it was what the particles of black space in the universe were created for.

Suthep, slapped a cap on his head with the visor inverted to the back of his head and greeted the knocker in his underwear.