Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

“You said that!” yelled Kazem angrily.

“Oh, he agreed with me that he was wrong. He said that he wanted to see us. He told me that. Then we got visits from his men and this.”

When they arrived into what was to them an opulent mansion (a couple of the dozen rooms that were only marginally spacious by western standards) they saw him in the living room in front of a big screen where, what to the gods, were tenuous carbon copies of men falling from the windows of a skyscraper with their myriad papers. America (specifically New York City) was under siege.

The boys gestured the “wei” to him. He saw prayerful hands in front of faces and, except in the youngest who was hidden behind his sunglasses, their beggarly downtrodden expressions depicted their unworthiness to meet him. That was their ploy. He gestured the “wei” in return. He was begrudging of their entrance in his life and resented having to comply with the wishes of the eldest that the meeting take place. However, his plan was to neutralize the possibility of negative publicity. He just wanted to allow these meetings to take place from time to time. If the “thugs” thought that he would be giving them anything more than an occasional meal it was their own delusion and in the meantime he would be keeping any problems from occurring like the unlikely eventuality of an newspaper article scathing him for lack of interest in the welfare of his relatives and making an assumption that he wouldn’t be interested in the welfare of others. Something like that, unlikely as it was, could nonetheless happen if he didn’t pacify those who had the power to possibly create such problems. “Come in and sit down over here,” he said. The tone of voice of this avuncular stranger was grave and his face hardly glanced at them as their barefooted feet ascended into his domain. The television tugged in their diffident movements to plush, white, upholstered chairs and these chairs kept saying to Jatupon that he and his brothers had no right to sit there. Still and seated, they became like spectators at the Coliseum. It was a CNN glimpse into the future: skyscrapers ablaze from passenger jets deliberately being slammed into them. They were being made aware of horrific ways of dying and since it was so horrific there was no self-centeredness and movement by which to callously disregard it. They were empathic and there was no escape. Jatupon wanted to shake the gods from their slumber, to knock the emerald Buddha from its pedestal, and to hijack fate and turn it around at gunpoint from the cockpit. He wanted all life to cease and start again in parity and respect. He wanted deliverance for Siriaj Hospital freaks, the aborted, the stillborn, deformed, diseased, and the downtrodden, those who die from malnutrition, old men who always think that their lives have been for nothing, the elephants that lose their molars and so search for a soft shaded area of grass to lie down in comfortable death, weaker animals not yet dead fallen as prey, soldiers who must lose their lives in war, and child soldiers whose short lives were as instruments of hate. To him it was no wonder that they (humans) were bad. They were all conceived by greedy sexual devouring, these selfish absorptions and attempts at fitting into silk skinned robes and hallucinogenic shadows. The World Trade Center disaster was proof not only that people were bad but that there was no god overseer above looking at this clashing of wills. There was just malicious and inane preying on others and this time it might well be that these hijackers had not even been incensed at opulence and starvation which stood back to back like America and Afghanistan or a domineering state like America to a stateless one like Palestine. If this had been planned by the rich ex-Saudi, Bin Laden, it was just hate (senseless, irrational hate that existed for no particular reason at all), the desire for power, the idea of heroism and a sure ticket to heaven, and the dramatic thrill of destruction that would go down as historical.

It was strange that people should perish so terribly and that those perpetrating this action could rationalize America as a monster worthy of monstrous actions that would humble this one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Foremost it was strange to him that such suffering could be ignored, if not partially forgotten so quickly when Vanont, the servant, came in for the third time telling them that the dinner was getting cold and he wasn’t going to warm it up for the second time. No longer mesmerized, they came back to themselves. At the dining room table they began their banal chatter. They asked about the number of his servants, how long he had lived here, his typical working day, and what he did when he returned home. They wanted to ask about their aunt but they had determined as they rode over here that the subject might alienate their host. Except for Jatupon whose lips slightly frowned, the brothers gained pleasure pointing out various items in the room, asking questions about them, and feeling pleased to be in such opulence. The senator asked about Kazem and Suthep’s restaurant businesses. When Suthep made a more obvious attack to evoke sympathy for their nominal existence the senator said, “You are young. It is a first business.” Then to avert hearing anything more on that matter, he switched to Kumpee who had extorted this family reunion. He asked what he did for a living. Kumpee’s circumlocutory answer was no different than any hustler’s grandiloquence about selling one thing or another real or imagined. His quick words were inarticulate and glib. Nobody understood what he said for the words were mountainous heaps of illusion. The senator did find out that Kumpee had fathered a child. He had a baby girl. Kumpee took out the photograph from his wallet and then he passed it around. The senator affected a smile when he saw the picture but he conjectured that “this boy” was living from this arrangement with the girlfriend and the baby he had fathered. Jatupon, surprised like his other siblings, found pleasure in the thought that he was now an uncle. For a moment he felt love for this unseen entity and a desire to ensure that her life turned out better than his but then he realized that he would never see her, and being the child of a rich Chinese Thai, she would have a better life than he had.

The senator asked Jatupon why he was wearing sunglasses. He gave the rehearsed answer and then had to remove the sunglasses at the senator’s insistence. “The Songkran festival ended over a month ago,” said the avuncular stranger. “Why do you still have black eyes now?”

“Yes, but my face was really hurt badly” Jatupon responded. The senator looked at him sternly. He didn’t want to waste his night hearing their lies, and if they were all like Suthep, he didn’t want to hear the truths either. Kazem opened his mouth. He was prepared to say that Jatupon had gotten himself into a fight but when he saw the stern expression of the unbelieving host his words retreated. Jatupon saw himself and his brothers shaded in the dismal gray of those who could not be trusted. A man’s mind was a tenuous object swayed in the winds of discourse so when it sensed a disingenuous response in the surreal uncertainty of understanding a matter fully it cringed. He felt like he was casting shadows onto the senator’s grand walls like children using their hands to project shadows of rabbits and dogs. But then his conscience waned. He again remembered that the aunt and uncle hadn’t attended the funeral of his parents. He remembered his aunt’s magnanimous crusades to become so important in his life, seeing him educated by paying his tuition and sending him to private tutorials, the Bible school, the varnishing of Christ’s picture on wood, the taste of punch at the Bible School, and how outside the building there was a soccer ball tied to a string and a pole and how the children tried to compete to get the ball wound up on their side of the poll. She would sometimes come to pick him up and take him to an ice cream parlor. She didn’t have any children of her own. He frowned at the senator’s scolding facial expressions. He met angered glances with those of his own. The family chatted on. The senator seemed friendlier and Jatupon even began to look up from his plate. The distrust had diffused to the point where it ceased to matter. They chatted and their chatter was irrelevant.

“Why did this happen?” blurted out Jatupon from nowhere. “If it is Islamic terrorists how could they hate that badly? Is it envy of a wealthier and more powerful country, or the hatred toward Israeli aid from the United States? I don’t understand it. We talk and talk and yet people are falling out of windows of 100 story buildings. How can we eat and carry on with things?”

Kumpee and Suthep scoffed at him.

“It is barbaric, barbaric no matter what line of reasoning they use to justify their actions. Do you know anything about the Islamic world and why it dislikes the west, Jatupon?” The choice of his words were influenced by his Moslem background.”