Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

She frowned. Was this what they had become: a couple of tycoon wannabes, two individuals acting like a married couple, or worse two people acting like an old couple reminiscing about their early days in front of bored games or a deck of cards? They did not have years together-just two or three months of knowing each other—and she thought he had no right to reminisce about anything. As much as she hated the past, the present was equally bad at absorbing one in its reality. She had now become his wife because she was with him at present. His wife had been relegated as one force that had brought them together because she was not immediately accessible nor was she sexual. “Oh,” she said disinterestedly. She rolled the dice with more force and moved her token from the present to the future. “I’ll take that railroad,” she said. Still she couldn’t help being influenced by him and for a couple seconds she was absorbed in that immediate past. That day had been good but strange. After Noppawan had taken her shopping at Chatuchok Market for clothing, they briefly went into the Butterfly Farm and Insect Museum (a neutral alternative to the deleterious proposal of Siriaj Hospital’s dead people museum that made Porn gasp). The butterflies were fine. She enjoyed seeing their colors flittering around the caged park although the encasement of dead insects in the adjacent room was not to her liking. The face bug with its human camouflage on its back was for her as frightening as it was fascinating to Noppawan. She watched this wife of Nawin. She was the type that would put her nose and glasses up against, in her opinion, the damnedest of things. When they arrived at the married couple’s second home on the opposite part of the city he was fixing a meal for the three of them. He was preparing salad, toasting hamburger buns on a barbeque, and microwaving meatless tofu hamburgers in a culture that was all his own. As the two women chatted on the balcony Porn tried to overcome feeling like a face bug caught in a key chain. As they ate, dusk elongated and then intertwined their shadows before night approached. Soon the remnant of the day became a violet, a purple, and a black and she felt like a child first introduced to colors through crayons. They watched the lit barges on the river and gorgeous glassy skyscrapers with lit angular tiaras. Strangely enough she felt at peace with them as if they were more than friends but family and the words of model or prostitute did not exist. Still it was strange and uncomfortable because it was so strange.

He dreamed that he was in her mind, that there was adrenalin in the rebellion, that this adrenalin was the meaning of it all, and that the meaning of all luminesced from her. Immediate relatives and some more distant ones had her life planned for her; and her parents, the main instigators of the status quo in their family, were rocks. They didn’t change apart from greed that intensified with years and tiers. Stratums of higher and more violent winds raged them in insatiable appetites. Wants fed more wants insatiably. They stayed on the same growing pieces of land, had the same opulent homes and efficient factories (although more and more of them), matched political ideas to whatever brought benefits to their wallets, and with these government positions they implanted such aspirations on the little brother’s mind with the idea that he was clay by which a conqueror with a double edged sword of business and politics was formed. After going into the monastery to have his foray as a monk and finishing his university education he would be this and once she found a man in college she would be that.

She, the girl, would be less of the plan but still, years into the future, they would partition a piece of their land and give it to her husband. She would be expected to reproduce her higher beings on their land allowing the elderly parents to be spared loneliness by the sounds of young voices. She would be expected to take care of them as their servants had taken care of her and to absolutely inebriate them against any suffering as if Buddha’s attempts at bypassing human suffering had been an avoidance of it. This would begin in a decade or so (such a quick passing of time). She would be expected to succumb to female yearnings-this needing of another to escape the lonely void, this need to reach out for the silk of human flesh, to consume, to care, to be intermingled entities in love, and reproduce. And yet she had been nothing but a little doll that they had shown off and shoved into a storage room especially when she was dirty or naughty.

And then her bedroom became a limb of a tree and there she was transforming into an adult female mosquito and he was becoming a male one. There they both were in complete maturity. He did his dance and he rubbed his legs so as to attract her with his sound. She was ceramic in her stiffness. Her skin was ochre like the dead bodies at the Siriaj Hospital museum sunk into their glass caskets of formaldehyde. Yet her eyes were lively even though they looked at him so askance and distant. She smiled with her closed insect lips. The smile was ingenuous and warm but wry. He could tell from these infinitesimal muscular contractions and relaxation in her stony insect face that she did not want him to think of their friendship as a relationship and the words passed from brain to brain (hers to his, his to hers, and hers to his like a mutating ping pong ball) something to the effect that a being was born selfish and two selfish beings together were a compounded selfish knot and so something new was in order. Something new was in fact in order. There, ardent in her eyes, was the relationship of her parents: it was based on hoarding property and power. It also was based on begetting emotional servants for their old age and that in particular was abhorrent to her. But he, the male mosquito that was programmed for copulation and no other task, loved her. He had to since he needed her for the satisfaction of his hungers and a deliverance from the past. He continued with his male-on-the-make dance. She bit into him. His blood was on her lips.

And when he woke up he wasn’t himself. His ideas were discombobulated and he could tell that his consciousness or sanity was like a loose button on a thin thread dangling from his shirt. He was ill and numb as if all of his senses were bandaged over in gauze. He woke up fully, checked his face in the mirror to see that it was still the same, and washed it. He tried to desist from many thoughts. Thoughts were pins stabbing him. He turned on the television, muted the sound, and saw images as the hours of the day became vanquished. Then Kazem came back early to bring him some food and in so doing he suspended their mutual reticence briefly.

“I have some food for you,” he said in disgust.

“Thanks” Jatupon responded in insolent despondency.

The next day it was the same. Kazem came back briefly with some food and a new pair of sunglasses for Jatupon’s face.

“I have some food for you,” he said in disgust.

“Thanks” Jatupon responded in insolent despondency.