“I don’t really,” he said. “ If Bin Laden is so rich it isn’t inequality that he hates. Tyrants like building up empires but he doesn’t seem to want one—just wants to destroy the west. I don’t understand it at all. I know that there are 7000 American soldiers in the holy land of Saudi Arabia to protect that area from Iraq’s aggression and—” He swallowed hard. He knew that his brothers would hate him. “I know that America continues to supply Israel with millions of dollars in aid and billions of dollars in weapon sales even though Israel still occupies what was once Palestine.” He knew that he needed to summarize these issues with some scanty understanding to impress the senator. “America imposes sanctions against Iraq out of fear of its military buildup but these sanctions cause thousands of people to die from malnutrition. America financially backed Iraq against Iran in that war and the Taliban against the Soviet Union and now those regimes were the wrong choices. The enemy of my enemy is my friend was the wrong philosophy. Those were bad foreign affairs blunders. They continually interfere with the policies of Moslem countries so that the oil that drives their economy doesn’t cease. It is economic considerations that cause them to back the governments of Algeria and Egypt that they can influence even though those governments are not democracies. They’ve made Iraq and Iran as strong as America.”
The senator knew that this was a good understanding for a 14-year-old boy. “How do you know these things, Jatupon?”
“He reads a lot of comic books,” said Suthep. They laughed.
“I go to the library when I can,” he said modestly. “Sometimes I go there just to read comic books and once in a while I read Newsweek.”
“Do you know English?”
“Yes, I do,” he said proudly. The senator found himself interested in the boy the way his ex-wife had been. Her reasons, however, had been maternal ones and her disinterest had been from the same source. A voice of an alter ego that was fettered in a private chamber in the cellar of her mind shrieked stridently that this was no child of her own and it had been for this reason that she had dropped him from her life suddenly. His interest was of a man who sees continuum of what he is or a rejuvenation of what he was. Both reactions were selfish ones but this was the planet Earth where most good actions were dictated by egocentric realms.
Vanont yelled that one of the buildings was imploding and the senator got up from the table. “Continue eating,” he said as he exited the room. Jatupon looked out of the window. Thai thunder crackled the skies like an empty bag of potato chips. Lightning streaked across the Thai skies naked and ominous. There he was seated with his brothers in that home they had always wanted to enter for so many years. And yet instead of being the happy family members visiting the relatives, they were nothing but a group of extortionists who had manipulated their way through locked gates. This fraternity of boyhood had evolved on higher tiers of wants into a Tower of Babel, a tower of thugs.
Low levels of hate still exuded from him toward Kazem who had done this to his face. He was sedentary in his own guilt for his attempt to murder Kazem, which later led to the best sexual experience he had ever had. Hate and the frenzy of love were rotting the best aspects of him that was so neatly named a soul. Hate and love had been horrible fulminations of neediness that ignited a person into another being, possessed will, and thrust reality into chaos. Sure this release of sexual tension, in the acme of ecstasy, led to Nirvana like any well thrust missile but each intimacy was like a cow that jumped over the moon.
He heard his brothers talk but did not listen to anything. Talk was a kinetic sport. The mouth was a spout. In it emotions were like boiling water steaming out the teapot. For him, the introvert who communed with the original wisdom deep in the stagnant pool of his being, there was only the window and a landscape of waxy greenery in the rain. He was mesmerized in the mellifluous monotony of rain slapping against the window.
Men falling from the windows of the World Trade Center in New York: the world was an evil place and he wanted to sink under the veil of Childhood for it was benign. Guileless, ingenuous, innocuous, worriless childhood was where the imagined was tangible and personal. Planes deliberately crashed into skyscrapers incinerating buildings and people: this was solid proof that it was a godless universe, but then he had always assumed that it was such. Still to take a deep breath was amazing. To be thinking was amazing. To see from the window such a beautiful verdant acreage and rain pouring onto it making it greener yet was like fecund life commencing after the destruction of a forest fire. His parents died but in so doing here he was in the senator’s dining room: wasn’t this an amazing chain of events even if their arrival had been obtained badly? The senator called them to come in with their plates and drinks. For Jatupon it felt like they were a family huddled together in front of the television—images of tragedy shared together in common.