Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

Walking away from the kiosk, he wanted to return to early childhood: of hopscotch, climbing trees with his brothers, Suthep teaching him how to throw a ball, taking cups of ice to the customers so that they could pour out the water in pitchers that were on their tables, skin around the eyes that wasn’t black and swollen, and the time when his body wasn’t being invaded. He could run away for good; but where would he run? There was nothing in Ayutthaya and if he really wanted to run away he would be more invisible in Bangkok. He would need money. He considered becoming a Luk Thung singer of Traditional Thai music. They wore their heavy makeup and pointed golden tiaras for beggarly bits of baht. However, he told himself that his voice probably wasn’t as good as the worst of them and even if it was he did not want to do tricks for a few baht. It was too demeaning and contrary to the aristocratic life he envisioned. There was a famous Swedish Luk Thung singer named Jonas Anderson who had lived his whole life in Thailand but only someone with vocal training and boldness could persevere to be someone accomplished in this musical genre. He could run to Noppawan Piggy’s home. He had the address on the mail she sent to him. But there would be no sense in running to someplace that Noppawan herself was running from and the likelihood of a rich family taking in a strange teenager, and an ex-burglar and quasi-drug addict at that, was more than a remote possibility. An emaciated dog with clumps of fur falling out had a greater chance of being made into a pet. Just as the need for the enzymes of animal protein was one trait of many linking the human to and as an animal, so enmeshed in soul, sentiment, and survival he clung to Kazem for his sense of home and family.

He knew that he was just a collection of molecules being shot out into space and time. Others were the same but they flew away from him in their own deviant paths. He knew. He thought he knew. Did he know? Did he really know anything? Thoughts were so dreary. They enervated him. He got on a bus to go home (that stationary foundation from which outlook, experience, thought, and restoration of energy for movement were generated). Even on such a simple event as going home he was lost in the intricate circuits of his brain, lost in the labyrinth within himself.

But through the window he saw the clear beauty of other beings that passed; and even in the ugly faces there was a posture, a smile, even a vehement depth of lonely despair so uniquely beautiful and yet universal. The bus passed four stores each of which seemed to alternate a presentation of boys, dogs, and combinations sleeping against the facades of buildings. The passing was quick like fingers moving against a keyboard and the sight was as euphonious as melancholy in sound. Then for a second, in stalled traffic, Jatupon found himself looking into the deep eyes of a deformed boy beggar. Jatupon was inside the bus and the boy outside of it, but they both saw an affinity in each other. They were the same. They were both unfortunate beggarly outsiders beaten up by life; and yet he was riding around in an air-conditioned bus. He was not one of the 2 billion people who lived on 2 dollars a day in a rural area on the verge of starvation. Inside the bus the facial expressions of the money collector were stone as death with monotony that was distinct, ebullient, and luminous as sunlight against wind-rippled leaves. A woman sleeping in a seat to his right had a head that fell toward the aisle, straightened, fell again, and straightened like a pendulum.

He might have gone back to work to appease Kazem. He might have started taking orders from the customers with no explanation and let the hours make the whole issue of his long absence mute. His brother would not have made an embarrassing scene in public. The hours would alone have just slowly uncorked it all allowing the rage to disperse slowly and unnoticed. The restoration of old habits would have made the past issue so irrelevant that a bit of the mind would have questioned if his absence had even occurred. It had been his intention to do so when he left the comic book kiosk and it continued to be his intention when he sat on the seat in the bus. Yet a human being fulfilled few intentions. Scholars were sociable creatures who needed meaningless action and cacophony even when it adulterated their aims. Petty government officers on their meager salaries, as well as the well-paid top tier, didn’t need to be cloistered in the political issues that mired the day but yearned for sports columns in their newspapers and genuflected to the action effusing from their television sets. And tired people on Bangkok busses that were plodding their way slowly through traffic had intentions other than sleep but yearned for rest and an easy way home. He was one of the latter that needed sleep; and yet when he was in the cell, which was his home, his mind was active in dread. Its color was gray, its texture coarse, and the molecules that oozed up from it acrid. Within the space of his own head he was vanquished in the gloom, the nothingness, the vanished thoughts of the hollow cavities that were part of one waiting for punishment. He lay on the floor with an old, previously read comic book in his hands. His head was so preoccupied with the barrenness of thought and the feeling of dread that he didn’t understand the pictures and the words. He got up. He dipped up a bowl of rice from a rice cooker, drenched it in soy, chili sauce, and a bit of pepper and vinegar. He did his pushups in front of a televised soccer game and when the game was over he shut off the set and in an hour sleep percolated over him. In his dreams he was in a penthouse on the fifteenth floor and below him were beggars like moving dots. Above the moving dots were moving golden skies of sunset. Gigantic clouds moved through the air in the shape of viruses.

Then there was a punch on his face and it reopened the facial wound causing blood to rush on the floor. In that second his dream fragmented into many dreams and spun out of control. He was no longer in a penthouse but was a sidewalk-based seamster with his little antique sewing machine, a pedal, and a hill of torn clothes he was supposed to sew. He was all alone on a cement cover of a city sewer that went under the sidewalk. Then he fell into the sewer. Self was gone. In the last of his dream or dreams, before he completely awakened, there was no self. There was just the scene of a large park ahead of him, the aesthetic glow of a withdrawing sun, and an old man who bought some phad-thai and found a pavilion near a lake. He sat down and began to eat his noodles, watching the lights of skyscrapers and the fast moving traffic far beyond the lake. The cacophony of boys playing football irritated him because he was envious of it. He put his empty Styrofoam container back in the plastic bag and laid it down. A rat scurried from one flower and fern bed; and dragged the bag into another flowerbed. The old man could hear the gnawing of the Styrofoam. Jatupon sensed that the rat might be himself.

He felt blood oozing from him and uniting as a puddle under his face. Kazem, dumbfounded by the vehement rage that disgorged from him, floundered a few steps in the room, sat down, and whined, “It’s all on me. If you are on drugs or stealing something, I’ve got to get you out of it. It’s all on me. I have to be responsible for you but you just do whatever you please.” His voice trailed away and faltered. He cleared his throat. “You don’t ever behave with any responsibility toward me. I give you days off here and there. I don’t get any. You work or don’t work or work for one of us and not the other based on how you feel on a given day. You steal money out of my pockets and I don’t say anything. Don’t blame me. You’ve brought it on yourself.” Jatupon sat up and glared with one eye. The second eyelid was already drooping from swelling. It wouldn’t open fully and it squinted from a bit of blood that sank into it. He intuitively guessed that his brother knew he was losing control of him. He waited and observed the guilt-ridden countenance and the gauche retreat from the offensive. He judged that the assault had been a desperate one. Jatupon smiled malevolently as of a masochist exuding pride that the pain had only brought the opposite wish of the inflictor. Kazem’s unpaid noodle worker who wasn’t allowed to loosen his fetters and shackles had slipped from them anyway. He had gone out to see Piggy and there was nothing Kazem had been able to do to stop him. Jatupon smiled wider. Then he guffawed scoffingly like a lunatic although the pleasure soon extinguished itself.

“Do you want me to come over there and squeeze the juice out of your head?” The muscles in Kazem’s arms and legs suddenly stiffened like one ready to suddenly stand and attack.

“I’m not listening to you,” Jatupon spoke firmly. “You are a pathetic bully-a fucking ape—and it is the end of it for me. It is the end of it!” Manhood’s conviction and effrontery reeked from his mouth like foul breath and Kazem, who already wanted to wreak havoc on his impudence, flipped him over with the elastic of his underwear like a pancake.

“Okay, swim in your own blood. Swim! Let’s see you drown in it.” Jatupon’s hair was twisted in Kazem’s fingers and his face was in his own blood as the thick leather hand swatted him a few lateral slaps. Then Kazem’s compunction again caused him to flounder back to his seat.

It was the only chair in the room. He put his elbow on his leg and hand on the forehead of his genuflected head. His ideas were discombobulated.