Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

The city was fetid as his older brother’s shoes in the back of his girl friend’s car (the car that had brought them here); and yet its billboards and tall buildings were opulent. He imagined them glazed in morbidly saffron or vermilion dust the color of a monk’s robe and the color of blood and death. All the pedestrians were individually and rapaciously galvanized but banging against each other less systematically than the ants. They were ebullient like the bouncing of hair on a schoolgirl’s back since most of them were shoppers.

The brothers and the Chinese Thai woman passed another street. Near it was the edge of a small park with one blended shadow of the fronds of palm trees spread out among a patch of grass and providing a visual respite from traffic exhaust and pavement that seemed to define the city. Here he was slithering about like a snake acclimating to both a foreign environment and the alien skin that he was now wearing. These three weeks had made him unreal. His parents had ridden in the car alone; there was the car accident; then a cremation and the selling of property; the drive from Ayutthaya; the night at someone’s house in some type of a fever or hallucination; mosquito bites under a net; and himself turning into some type of caricature in a comic book or cartoon.

Whereas many other boys had books and knowledge he had his comics. He didn’t know anything about the techniques of art although he had thumbed through some pictures from a book at a library in Ayutthaya. He had never even been exposed to algebra or other intellectual exercises that brought one in touch (so to speak) with abstract realities. He had heard of the Internet and assumed it was the brand name of a certain computer but wished to know for sure. He knew that his poverty created his ignorance and felt his ignorance made him stupid. For him there was nothing but day to day living twisting about like a noodle fried in the juice of itself under the hot Thailand sun.

There was a secondary trait about him that despite his bleakly gray and vermilion self-deprecation he was pleased that he possessed. His 14 years of life had provided him with at least enough acclimating instinct or reflexes that, as they crossed the road, zigzagging through stalled traffic, his feet and ears performed a specific cautionary duality of quickness in speed and breaks. This allowed him to retreat from motorcycles without headlights that were swerving around multiple lanes of cars. Even within Ayutthaya, which was conspicuously absent of operable traffic lights, he had never had an accident. There was that time that he had flown off of a motorcycle taxi and over a vendor who had been wheeling his cart when the motorcycle had run into his toasted buns glazed in feces-tinted Ovaltine, but that was a different type of incident altogether.

Across the street culinary workers of the sidewalk poured soup and scooped rice dishes into plastic bags sealed with rubber bands or put the plates of food on metallic tables. So many city residents (all of whom lived in apartments) did not possess kitchens from some law or another. This, he supposed, was good. It had provided he and his family with an existence. It did the same for them. One worker who rested on a red stool enthralled him. Without any specific gestures or words sent to him, he nonetheless felt her listlessness and knew her anguish. He knew the 4000 baht that many indigent souls received. It was their permit to live; and to get this permit to ride in life they had to harness and ensnare the creative force that had conceived them and were them, and then allow themselves to be subservient seven days a week in their robotic roles of reflexes. He saw another one wring out a washcloth and clean another table. He could imagine her travail just as he understood the travail of those around him on overpasses: the emaciated elderly with cups in their hands seemed to cluster on and under every pedestrian overpass. To be homeless, he thought, would be more horrific than the moments at one’s death: a travail of being worthless and lost, where dangling blue from a rope inveigled the imagination that could not fathom a means to get 6000 baht and pull oneself off of a park bench. He felt: “I have been where you are with a hair net on my head, many late nights splintered on a wooden stool, or placid on a red plastic stool, strength thwarted, and with angular crowds stumbling over me.” Almost without thinking it, he felt the horror as he struggled for words; and since he did not have his journal with him, he tried to memorize the feeling.

He remembered those years of nights in Ayutthaya when his work had ended and he was free of the vending cart, and embraced within the black smog of busses. Then there was a reprieve from the gaseous smoke of cooked food (grilled pork and chicken) trapped between canopy roofs and sidewalk. His reprieve and liberation was only in comics borrowed from a newsstand. It was a personal life—a bit of himself in a vicarious existence. The words under the pictures would often zoom across the interior of his skull in his drowsiness like cars on a speedway and he would not comprehend anything much before falling asleep at one of the tables. In sleep he would not exist. Cartoon images would run amuck. His pent up needs would flow in action and adventure although his likeness would not be in the dreams.

If thought were a product made from the raw material of feeling, he felt more than thought: “Your reflexive and monotonous perfunctory days and nights are gloomy in starlessness. Face draped on the backs of your hands folded on the table, you almost look as if you are making the gesture of ‘wei’ or praying to Buddha.” He remembered that seconds before he was in those minutes of sleep, at the end of the work nights, he prayed for a way out or that community and connectedness could be gained within his limited life. He walked by the stranger. He walked past twenty others. With his eyes he bestowed onto them blessings.

He continued to follow his brothers through perennial steps and time and swayed alone as lifeless as wet laundry hanging on balconies during the dry season. The fetid one slammed him with poignant expletives to which the second eldest smiled and nodded his head. Suthep, however, had childish sensitivities of his own that life had not yet hacked from him but when Jatupon quickened his pace to walk near him Suthep looked over toward him with silent rage. Jatupon just turned away and sucked in his bottom lip. It was true that weeks had passed since the death of their parents and it was so that life went on—that it was quickly manufactured and quickly hit the dust bin like any worn out or broken commodity; but, he argued to himself, an admission of their own pain and a kind smile would have helped to keep his boyhood suppressed and his manhood poised.

Jatupon was still nonplused. The present was an undercurrent in his inundating thoughts. His vision was often cracked and misted in suppressed tears and his eyes burned from his sweat seeping into them. He felt disoriented and although it was apparent, it didn’t seem to evoke sympathy. In virtually his first words that day he hoarsely spoke incommunicably, cleared his throat, and then yelled over to Kazem, the second eldest, that he needed to go to the bathroom. Kazem stopped walking and told the youngest, Jatupon (to whom he nicknamed “Jatuporn”), to hold his water until they were “home.” The word “home” did not make any impression on the youngest who was now wondering if they would be spending the rest of their lives walking in this fashion.

He felt that they were sinking in an abyss of negative probabilities. Concerning the pejorative comment about holding his water, it was no worse than being called “Jatuporn.” He was used to it.