Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

“A le nuh?,” (what is it?), asked Suthep as he straightened the cap. It was a man in livery asking the surname of this family of impoverished brothers. Suthep imagined the stink of his armpits as he addressed the guest and the staleness of air in the room which was in deep need of a deodorizer. He began to feel foolish but he kept his boyish poise while the man tried to withhold his laughter. He didn’t hear the question. The man repeated it and Suthep wanted to prevaricate. Then he reluctantly said that his last name was Biadklang. It was the senator’s page and they were finally invited to meet the apotheosis that had given them their living.

Chapter 11

It was no wonder that one set of freaks felt cognate with another set. For him, the sight of the formaline or formaldyhyde-laden corpses at the Siriaj Hospital Museum as well as the girl who introduced him to them seemed to have exhilarated a nascent courage, an oozing, a growth hormone of the mind. New neurological connections were burgeoning or the same ones were reconnecting in different patterns. Anyhow, he felt the inception of something new that made him feel that he wasn’t quite the same: that he was outgrowing patterns of behavior. He was not able to distinguish if his freakishness was exceptional, deficient, or exceptionally deficient to the point of being inept. Certainly if his gray matter made him innately exceptional, his noodles made him less than ordinary. His gray matter was becoming grayer with each dusk of a dying day. Being with noodles so long no doubt loosened this compact tissue of brain into something quite slimy. The use of his brain in the mundane tasks of thinking about the size of meat he wanted to cut with the butcher knife had perhaps cut his corpus callosum. At least he thought so. But regardless of being superior or inferior in his freakishness, this was who he was. There was a history: the history was of being maimed. There was the character of Jatupon: there were dark prodigious forces inside and outside that frame that were ineluctable. No celestial power would rectify his life by making family better than what it was or himself, the sordid bastard that loomed there, as hallowed and saintly as what he once believed monks to be. Nature begot freaks of the worst kind and so becoming a freak in the tossing of the passing years was understandable.

Jatupon’s ego was not turgid. In ways it was self-deprecating. That which hadn’t been squashed by his father and eldest brother, poured into countless bowls, or slapped onto myriad plates had such deformed and stunted growth. He had trouble making opinions about people. He did it with shy reluctance and usually the feelings he had about them never emerged all that much in a cohesive thought. He considered Noppawan Piggy to be his superior in intellect and yet there was one thing about her he had to admit that he detested and that was the abhorrent smell of baby powder that came from her body. It made Jatupon feel like his nose had gotten trapped in a dust storm in which naked and screaming babies flew with the dust in an attack against him. Not all girls and women in Thailand smelled the same but those who had abhorrent smells, although not abhorrent themselves, couldn’t be said to be totally agreeable.

Upon leaving the park his intention was to go to the library and look up information on the peculiarities he had seen in the museum that had smiled upon him freak to freak but he found himself distracted by a large comic book kiosk that whisked him off from this world to that of another. One such comic book was set into the future of 3000 AD and non-existent creatures with little resemblance to anything extant propelled him into problems of their non-existent agricultural and mining planet-colonies and he lost himself there for an hour. How splendid it was to lose oneself wholly and he savored the time there until his left foot fell asleep while he was seated on a plastic stool. Then he stood up.

“Your time is up again.” Jatupon faced a scrawny teenager with glasses who was a year or two older than he was. “Are you reading or buying?”

“Reading” he said; but afterwards he stretched his neck only to see his reflection in the store’s anti-theft mirror. The skin around his eye looked darker and it felt even more painful.

“You need to pay another fifteen baht to continue reading.”

“No, I guess I’ll stop reading. I’ll go,” he said.

Standing there ready to go, his taciturn heart pardoning Kazem who had been the only one who cared about him, he tried to not think about the hot stinging of the swelling around his eye. Instead, he thought about this uncle whom he had only met on rare occasions long ago. It seemed that it only took the frequent utterance of his name and they had been granted a livelihood—a continuing sustenance as if by magic. And yet it had not exactly been much of an effusion of magic. It had been the most niggardly and scanty display that any affluent magic man could bestow and it brought the renewal of their servitude. Before they were restored to a similar but diminished livelihood, they had often spoken of this vaguely real or super-real entity (this uncle by a marriage) as one might think of the early king Ramas of the Chakri Dynasty.