“You might have a nervous breakdown if you were to continue. Kazem was your link. It’s gone now.”
“I’d rather die than go back to it now. Die in the streets if I have to.”
“I think you are zipping up your pants again and finding them too tight. You are shedding your boyhood.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes,” said the mosquito pensively. “Unfortunately, it was your best trait.”
The mosquito dissipated with the smoke of Jatupon’s cigarette that he rested and twirled in his fingertips. Smoking was his new habit that he pursued in the hope of having a more insouciant image, which with practice, he could learn to believe in. Boys of himself at earlier ages came and pressed their noses near him as he had done long ago to the glass outside the Dunkin Doughnuts Restaurant in Ayuttayha. Long lost versions of himself at various ages passed up against him and passed him by. They too dispersed with the gaseous midst of black carbon smog released by the traffic. His head was spinning around skyscrapers and billboards. They, he, a single homeless woman who rented out babies to increase the chances of getting more substantial alms, two dogs copulating, and all, were dwarfed in advertisements for shark fins for the man with refined taste, Electric piecemeal billboards for Singh Beer and cellular telephone companies with new images rotating with the pieces, plain billboards of pimpleless white skinned Thai models selling or hustling some facial cream, flashing and mutating signs advertising various self-improvements seminars at different universities and at the Convention Center, neon animations of Barcelona’s Bangkok tour for the Invitation Cup Football Match, and advertisements for every international and domestic product imaginable thrust into the hands of consumers in the form of flyers. Indeed, it was obscene enough to make a man become a monk: orgasmic organisms, sensation of void.
Chapter 13
The glue-induced waves of befuddlement came to him curled like talons and this twisted and grotesque inundation beat his shore pulling and pushing bits of himself fervently in all directions. It was as his father had told him often: he did not know if he was coming or going. He was both becoming more conscious of himself and his environment and yet more despondent with strange thoughts fulminating out of his living carcass, controlling him. He was moving toward reality and yet diverging from it. He believed that he was downtown with Noppawan and that they were wasting some time before the meeting with this former avuncular image. They were walking through a mall and he was thinking how long ago in boyhood he and his brothers had entertained the thought of this man really being family to ease the pain of routine constricting them in noodles. In the hallucination they left the mall and went into an adjacent 80-story building and then took a high-speed elevator to the top of that skyscraper. There the couple sat in the opulence of the Baiyoke Sky Lounge revolving around glass windows and ordering their cappuccino.
Then he wasn’t there. He was in his room, his cell, staring out of the window. He was watching a tiger watching the descending sun. He was startled. He hadn’t known that animals would look out at the beauty of a descending sun. The tiger noticed him and got up; but discerning this human’s own benign posture directed toward the same sunset, the tiger returned to where it was at and once again revered the sun. Then he was walking the streets and feeling such a crazy loneliness. He began to mutter nonsense and he felt himself numb and slipping on his own frozen thoughts. It was very strange for he wasn’t moving and yet the streets moved him—strange as the fetid one, Kumpee, having been the angel who had come at the right second delivering him from his worst impulses to kill Kazem. If anything had given him food for thought that week of idleness and recuperation in his cell, it had been the irony of the fetid one as his guardian angel. If the fetid one had not stepped in nothing would have intervened and he would have murdered his brother or been murdered by him. If Suthep had come at that instant, instead of Kumpee, he would have believed in Buddha or God. As it was, he believed in Glue and its power to imitate the strange magic of the world that was all around him.
His hallucination took him through the drenching storms of heavy rains and again to the heavily billboarded world of downtown opulence: iridescent Isuzu Ascender, its back wheels aired above a city, front wheels ascending toward the fiery black nothingness of space, ascend, it says, ascend, as if it, a thing, were the portal to creation, the why, the reason of it all, ascend; Compaq Computers, don’t be left behind, don’t, easy just a don’t; large, sprawling cursory sentences of lumination on these black moliminous rectangles towering above all the tiny traffic, tiny cars and tinier lives, advertising self-help and get-rich seminars; a more conventional but gigantic billboard placed near a skyscraper lit like stage lights on an actress, a gigantic face of a beautiful Chinese Thai with clean and white Chinese skin that stayed pimpleless with Johnson and Johnson’s Clean and Clear. There were electric rotating piecemeal signs advertising cellular phones and internet providers (instantaneous messages not for his patronage). Advertisements were on the sides of busses and bus stops of happy soap families and big-breasted bra wearers both of which made the saliva increase in his mouth the way an orange would. Shop signs crouched low with sidewalk beggars, international fast food restaurants and flyers thrust into hands: and it all spoke of the city the same as the skyscrapers that alone were the epitome of opulence and disparity. “What do you want from life?” said the whore at her door. “Enroll at Siam University and find new opportunities. Don’t let bad grades stop you,” she continued. “Come in, and I’ll give you a massage that will make your body feel in ways you’ve never imagined,” said the shark restaurant worker who made a commission luring those of supercilious tastes to a cuisine laced in marginal traces of mercury. “Shark Fins this way,” said the tuc tuc driver eager to compound a taxi fee with an agency’s commission for bringing a foreigner to a beloved half-hour lady of the night. “Want a girl?” asked the white robed female Buddhist nuns who had shaved heads and collection canisters in their hands as they stood on the steps leading to the platform of the sky train like Hara Krishnas. Jatupon heard the door open.