“She always said that you were clever.”
“I wish I could go away and be somebody different than what I am, and yet I wish that I could be important to them and that the four of us could be a close family. You too, if you want.”
“Jatupon, families aren’t forever. Boys grow up and they gain their own lives. They have children. Those children grow up. I don’t know what you might or might not have done to get into a fight with them or one of them but it didn’t deserve a fist in your face. You look awful. Give me a week. I want you to contact me in a week. I’ve got some work I need to do and Vanont will show you and your brothers out. He’ll point you in the direction of the bus stop. It isn’t all that late. All the busses should still be running. Tell your brothers that we’ll try to get together again in a couple months or so.”
From the window of the classroom, Noppawan saw the wind kick about the branches of the trees in an anomaly not characteristic of Bangkok weather. She hated feeling hostage to proctor the eye movements of these students, to walk every several minutes through the aisles of the desks, and to scrutinize wanton little individuals prepossessed of schemes for cheating that could improve their chances of getting good grades and hasten the end of the tests. Their main wishes were for the resurrection of their still cadavers to the kinetic movement of going with their friends to the next Hollywood movie, the next shrill of laughter, gossip, and karaoke booths in the corridors of malls. She liked the wind’s attitude of just knocking around the day, kicking off the old leaves, and dancing about. She wondered why she admired kinetic movement in nature and not in the uniformed idiocy of the students before her. It was, she answered to herself, because each of these uniformed specimens probably did the same exact actions of their fathers and mothers before them. Certainly year after year new groups of freshmen were identical to each other. They engaged in senseless programmed activities like ants: the mating frivolity before working and hoarding. As rich as they were (these future owners of their parents’ factories) they were walking down the same hill toward their deaths no different than the worker ants. None of them contributed to the permanency of thought and understanding. They just followed and followed.
Nature experimented, she caused uniqueness in form if not attitude, she continentally drifted lands for the hell of it, she erupted volcanoes and earthquakes in the damnedest of places and let her creatures adapt or perish. Nature was an alchemist and a lover of the extraordinary. Noppawan wanted to open a window. After all, the students were cold in the air conditioning and she wanted to feel the breeze, but some fool or another who supervised proctors would complain that something in the room wasn’t orthodox. She didn’t want to get a letter in her mailbox complaining that she hadn’t sealed up the envelopes of the tests with enough tape or another odd irrelevant idea because she hadn’t been as orthodox as she should have been.
It was the administration that consisted of desperate fools during times that were irregular. She had been forced to teach an anthropology class this semester. How that was related to zoology she couldn’t say unless the administration was privy to the philosophy of mice and men. All she knew was that the anthropology teacher ran away and they were in desperate need of someone to fill the gap as well as perform her regular duties. A numb throbbing of life’s dreariness overtook her as she walked around these handsome faces and thought to herself how she really wanted to open the window.
Her husband had not throbbed his body in her inordinately so she did not understand why she was jealous of his activities, and yet she was. It was this beyond all other things that was a gloom over her sedentary thoughts that were constricted to monitor the eye movements and actions of the students and to be the perfect guard of these prisoners that had been assigned to her. She looked at the girl test takers. Unlike Porn, whose focus was business, they were disrespectful whores whose interest was only in sucking up the pheromone fumes, having babies, and raising them to fulfill their need for stability and permanence. To have a role in the world (that of being a mother) would override the love needs of the contributor of the sperm, and they would cling to motherhood as salamanders in the rain. That “salamander in the rain” idea had been one of her husband’s more clever thoughts that he attributed to the lack of creativity he saw around him. He was clever and she had liked him so much for so many years. She hadn’t been in love with him until his departure. If she had been like all other women she would have succumbed to these feelings and thoughts that she needed her man terribly. Their overwhelming power tried to destroy her resolve and only the idea that these feelings were illusions was she able to maintain her integrity. The feelings were unadulterated neediness because of his adultery-the jealous biological programming of a woman. This feeling of love, this motif of women and pop culture, vexed her. It was annulling her marital contract that had been engendered out of friendship of two people who were complete unto themselves. Well, he wasn’t so complete. He did whine. That was for sure. There was a boy that came out from time to time needing a mommy. It had been nauseating to tolerate to say the least; but she had done so under the firm belief that most men were worse than he was on this point. And for her, there were female vulnerabilities but earlier she had been prudent enough to get herself sterilized and minimized her sexual activity.
Before she came into the classroom she had encountered a couple of her colleagues laughing shyly. In the couple seconds that she drew near them before passing they were tacit in the shamefaced ways of Thais. She knew that many of them gossiped about her who was the wife of a man celebrated for his adulterous debauchery. She could have been their holy martyr as the object of sympathy and the icon of women’s suffering but her frank endorsement of her husband’s activities to newspaper reporters had made her the subject of ridicule. A man would be totally lost if he didn’t have his extramarital affairs, she said. He would have no knowing of the nothingness of his misadventures unless he were to experience minutes of despair after the orgasm was complete. This is what she told the reporters on a few occasions-each time expanding on her ideas and making them more colorful than at previous times. She was proud of creating the Noppawan doctrine and she knew that because of it the university wanted to get rid of her. In ways she was proud of being sneered at but it was uncomfortably lonely. She imagined the thoughts of these two instructors who passed her, “Craggy thing, no man would mount you. It is no wonder that you’re forlorn for the whores.” No, they’d never even say anything like that even to each other. They wouldn’t even consciously think it. Thais were too polite and too deferential to even the despised for that: instead there was that shamefaced laugh and that reciprocal glance. Then, as she was walking to Building P with the tests that she had picked up from the administration office, a boy and a girl were in front of her. This pair, holding hands, were taking up the whole sidewalk and blocking everyone from passing in their slow movements. The girl had books on her head that she was trying to balance. The boy watched her lovingly. She wanted to smack them-these dummies who were dopamine gluttons. Everywhere she went it was young couples in love. She wanted to get out the biggest can of Raid and perform a major insecticide/genocide that would give Miloshevik a companion in the Hague; but being a humane individual such hideous thoughts could only instigate a wry smile or an occasional chuckle. When she saw such couples everywhere it made her feel an antithesis of things: like an uncomfortable young girl experiencing the wetness of blood being absorbed into her tampons for the first time and as of a 26 year old tripping around in her days with an old woman inside of her.
This subject she was proctoring was business law, a subject so unrelated to her field. She unfastened a sheet of paper that was posted on the window and looked at this list of student names. She matched their identification cards to the list of names and got each of their signatures. Weird ideas took over her brain as she looked into their faces one by one and at their photographs on their student identification cards. “Surawit ,without glasses you would be as ugly as with them; Wilawan, that bun of a pony tail is one thing that has just got to go; Sira, you have nice swarthy skin so fuckable but that nose is like it came from the days when wild boars used to roam the whole planet-totally obscene and pugnacious; Kanoknant, really are you the same girl in this picture I.D? How strange! It looks like your older sister and you look like you’d be one of the proud little girls who possess one of these book bags near the white board with little stuffed animals dangling from them-oh, god, I bet your parents hold their heads in chagrin after giving birth to you; Pornpitcha, ya’ frizzed orange hair is of a disco queen; Wiliwan playing beauty shop with your pony tail-better on yourself than on other girls since that is the usual preoccupation in classes; Pawisar, wouldn’t that fat face be less obtrusive if your hair was put in a pony tail-well, maybe not...maybe it would be worse but still that hair is dangling into your face distracting you from taking the test and more importantly looking downright uncouth and stringy; Ekkachai, you certainly have a long tie-I wonder how big your penis gets.” Those thoughts droned on and on in the same pattern of crude novelty.