“No, come on. What did you say?”
“I don’t need you. I hate you worse than I hate him,” said Jatupon. Kumpee laughed and then all of them were taciturn for a minute. Kazem folded some clothes and put them in a bag. Kumpee got a bottle of coca cola from a carton in the corner and pulled off the bottle top by wedging it like a lever between the drawer of a cabinet and its handle. He drank slowly savoring every sip.
“Maybe that attitude toward older brothers is what has caused your head to be kicked around like a football,” said Kumpee after Kazem left the apartment and he heard the door shut. “What do you think about that, you little monkey,” he said as his fingers disheveled Jatupon’s hair abrasively and then pulled his ear playfully. “Just you and me, Jatuporn. Jatuporn. Why do you think that you are called Jatuporn?” Jatupon slithered into a dry corner and began to shake. He tried not to cry. “Why did you do that? I’m not going to hurt you,” said Kumpee; but it was really the loss of blood, the trauma, the opaque surrealism of what had occurred that made him tremble. “I see your eyes all watered. You want to cry, don’t you?”
“I want to sleep. I don’t understand any of this. I don’t.”
“You’ve got to know more than I do about it.”
“Well I don’t”
“Mmmm. Well, he was ready to put you in the television. You did something you shouldn’t or maybe you just wouldn’t let him put himself into you. Have you become a frigid bitch? Have you, Jatuporn? You thought I didn’t know about that, didn’t you? You thought that the nickname we created for you didn’t mean anything but just meanness but we had a reason for giving it to you.” He chuckled. “I keep an eye on my boys. That you can be sure of.”
Kumpee sat down beside the sprawled body of his brother and drank his cola in equanimity, from time to time placing the bottle between his legs. “I needed more from my life than this, you know. Do you remember when we were kids and we collected bottles like this. We got a few baht from the stores for every twenty we brought into them. We thought we would buy a Chinese restaurant for father and mother with air conditioning and an electric juke box.” He laughed. “Maybe you don’t remember. You were four or five.”
“I do.” Jatupon really couldn’t remember this but yearning for some unadulterated version of innocent love or compassion not linked to the selfish inclinations that were part of being human, he halfway believed that he remembered and he put his hand on his brother’s arm. Kumpee’s posture tightened. The eldest brother felt squeamish from a man’s hand on him but, not wanting to reject the youngest outright he did not move his arm. Also, a sick curious depravity began to flood out of the squalor of the recesses to his mind. He looked at the half-empty phallic bottle, picked it up, and said “What about this bottle? Would you take in anything hard?” But the youngest brother was asleep and so, a minute later, he removed the hand and abandoned him.