Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven Sills

Contents

“So he spoke, and the bright-eyed goddess, Athene, was pleased that she was the god he prayed to before all the others. She put strength in his shoulders and knees, and set in his heart the daring of a mosquito, which, though constantly brushed away from a man’s skin, still insists on biting him for the pleasure of human blood.”

—The Iliad
Homer

Book I: Palaver

Chapter 1

They, with their driver, went down Ramkhamhaeng Road singularly in the scope of their thoughts but conditioned into repudiating their aloneness. It was an early Bangkok morning with a new day tripping over the corpse of the earlier one the way dogs on the Bangkok sidewalks were walked on. It was early in the relationship of the two passengers and this nascent association contained the complex and awkward ambiguity of not being clearly professional or personal and he and his prostitute-model were tripping into each other. When she put her hand on his leg he would stiffen and both his legs would slightly slant away from her but when she removed her hand and kept it away from him for some minutes he would put it back there closer than ever to his thighs. Even he had to admit his actions made no sense given the fact that he flaunted her, and others like her, wherever he went; but it was part of the game of being desired. Although he wasn’t even conscious that such a game was being played, she was fully cognizant of these subliminal calculative moves and how a woman was played. She knew that she was desiring him more as a consequence. She also knew that being desired required adhering to the rules of withdrawing from the neediness of wanting to be linked to a man and of transforming herself into the metamorphoses of self-contained fantasies that he would desire.

Despite Thai’s reverence for royalty, the three of them went down Ramkhamhaeng Road without even thinking about the king behind the name. He, his whore, and perhaps the faceless one at the steering wheel as well, thought of themselves as a unit albeit an insignificant one. They had that sociable tendency to chat at each other to reduce the drone of one’s solitary and melancholic thoughts but it was less the case with the pensive passenger, Nawin (formerly Jatupon) who, Aristotelian and poised as a Garuda, was a surly contemplative despite lordly debauchery. Through being whirled in vicissitudes he felt that he could withstand anything fate had to offer. Unlike the others, he did not need to escape his thoughts as much as a bull from a corral. Instead, he befriended his morose tendencies.

Basking in the grandeur of his new stature, the back seat Nawin was dwelling on himself continually in the concern that his fame, isolated as it was, had not happened totally from the merit of his work. He wondered how much the licentiousness of his life and the salaciousness of the subject matter were the real color of what could be marginal talents. He wondered if he should change his subject matter proving himself as an artist even if it reduced the virility he felt as a type of swarthy Thai sex symbol. How strange it was, he thought to himself, that despite the fact that being dark was never an attractive trait in Thailand where the lighter, Chinese skinned Thais were thought to have more material success, sensuality, and beauty, he who was not particularly handsome from being dark as a shoe’s heel should be sexy from his wanton disposition. Likewise, his thoughts were dark in a land of frivolous irresponsibility. To Thai’s the word “serious” had a negative connotation and he was that. Unless one was a monk, being contemplative was a tacit violation of laws in the Land of Smiles. He had become the rescuer of whores humanizing their sorry plight. Their only sins were to be born poor and to be loyal enough to not pull out of the loose fetters of family obligations. They continued to remember shadowy figments of obscure rural relatives whom they needed to feed. Still being a hero was burdening him with a singular motif and he continually shot this thought through his neurological circuitry until the taxi driver spoke, parting his thoughts like Moses and the Red Sea or Buddha sabotaging a bit of the recycle factory of the human soul.

“My son flew into Chaing Mai recently. I’ve been wondering about airplanes ever since-just thinking about how things get off the ground.

Have you ever wondered that?”

“Ka,” meaning yes, the woman in the backseat croaked like a crow. “I’m trying not to question it. Wondering such things would make me scared that they don’t stay up in the sky,” she laughed. Her name was Jarunee but her nickname was Porn. “This will be my first plane ride soaring off with the birds.”

“Thais don’t often fly,” he said. His idea was tinged with a bitter undertone as if poverty turned one’s bones to lead and he found that his idea put him back in the solitude of his thoughts for only silence ensued. He decided to sound happier. “You sound excited.”

“It has been my dream.” She leaned her head against Nawin’s shoulder.

“Flew off to Chaing Mai. He lost his job during the financial meltdown of 96. 3000 baht. That’s what the family lived on each month for a good many years. Then she was pregnant and laid off from the restaurant and they stayed with us for five or six months. Of course they could have stayed longer. After all, they are family.”

“Yes, of course. You sound like a good father. I’m sure it will get better for everyone soon,” responded Porn as she looked up at the old face in the mirror hoping with softness to make the tenor of the conversation gayer.

“Krap,” he said meaning yes although he wasn’t in agreement. “No, he continually got more depressed and then no matter how many job interviews he went on, he came up empty handed. Then she took their children to her parents. He came up there a bit later. The in-laws had him but didn’t want him. He hadn’t been trained at anything but working in the factory. He didn’t know how to plant rice or maybe he was too depressed to learn. It wouldn’t seem there would be much to learn. You just put them into the ground. Anyhow, he was walking around in a daze all that time. That’s what she claimed they said about him. Soon he returned with us but before we knew it off he went to Chaing Mai. I don’t know why. I got a post card from there. It didn’t say much other than he had taken his first flight. Can you imagine just buying a ticket, leaving, and not saying a word.”

“Ka, not really. I can’t imagine anybody doing that...unless he just didn’t want to worry you. Maybe he didn’t want to worry you about if the idea was right or wrong financially. I bet he has friends there and they’ll help him to locate work.”

“Yes, it is the best thing. I’ve been going to the temple to give food to the monks and blessings will follow. I’m sure of that. I’ve never gone on a flight. Where are the two of you going?”

“To Montreal.”

“Where’s that?”

“To Canada.” She smiled but the word, favorable as it was, didn’t have the flavor of Paris or cities in America.

“What will you do there?”

Nawin wondered what she would be doing there. She had escorted him around galleries, parties, and auditoriums where he gave speeches. Bangkok gossip columnists had sometimes even mentioned her presence with him. What would she be doing in Montreal while he attended post-graduate classes? That was a fundamental question he had no answer for. He had granted unto her a new profession where she didn’t have to spread her legs to anyone but him. He had rescued her from stripping and whoring in a bar in Patpong but perhaps that would not be enough. Nobody was content. Like any animal, a human always yearned for more. They were trying to build up on themselves so that they were free of all discomfort. A woman was more that way than even a man based on his judgments and to be left alone in an apartment in a foreign country would be one major discomfort she would not tolerate. He began to miss his wife: she didn’t need anything—not even sex with him. She was free to love other things than him—higher things and he was free to love higher things than her as well as the lower things like Porn. It was for this reason that he loved her but he didn’t desire her so much except as an intellectual companion. This one he desired and that love certainly had more thrust than the former one. At least it appeared to be stronger.

The sky had tubes of light paint oozing out into the darkness and the sky could not ascertain if it wanted a moon or a sun in its presence. The ride was just beginning and yet it was monotonous in the darkness and the light of the street lamps that refracted glaringly. The three of them still remained as little conscious of the moon or, dependent on the limitation of their eyes, the corona of the moon, that they happened to glimpse as accompanying them on their early morning departure as they were of the monarch, Ramkhamhaeng, that was the source of the road’s name. The taxi driver was near-sighted so to him, as most things at a distance, the reality of it all was begotten as a blur.

The back-seated Nawin with the cigarette fuming and the legs sprawled out and thumping to his portable CD player and his model or whore with her hand again on one of his legs had their thoughts parted once more in the kinetic movements of linguistic moans.

“What airline will you be flying out of?” asked the taxi driver. Following patriarchal social etiquette he was addressing the man instead of the girlfriend despite not liking the smoke. The man was more than a customer but a member of the more affluent class and this by Thai, although not Buddhist standards, was well revered. How swift one’s encroaching aloneness was purged and thwarted in the retreat engineered by the batons and water cannons of one’s linguistic moans. The whore, whose self-image had been disparaged by the unconventional positive endorsement of her activities by the wife, was grateful to gain the parting of her thoughts from the driver’s voice. She was pleased to be once again hearing anything—even the least little unenlightening fact-about their trip. She smiled. After all, it was the land of smiles.

“Thai” mumbled Nawin’s voice from the back seat.

“Domestic or international?” asked the taxi driver as if amnesia had wiped away a whole section of memory. Porn released an alien chortle that made Nawin think that he was sitting on the back seat with some type of mythological, hybrid animal he was in the process of taking on an overseas journey. How quickly she had gone from seductress to a callow calf and kid. He smiled at the man’s ignorance without laughing. He felt that his girlfriend was ugly and noticed how mutable the sight of anyone was: at one-time ugly and at another time beautiful, at one-time virtuous and another point wicked, and at one point victim and another time slut. It was not only the physical dimensions that could vary from moment to moment. The perception of a whole being could change. He moved himself to the window to get away from her hand and feigned a curiosity with the world outside. He rolled down the window. At that moment they both had a similar jejune feeling of the repetition of old things and new things not fully connecting. It was indescribable to them both. Porn kept asking herself if she was doing the right thing in forsaking her responsibilities with her clients for the unknown of traveling with him.

“You look like you are car sick,” said the driver. “My son always got that way even a kilometer down the road when he was a boy. Matter of fact that happens to him now—not quite as bad, though. I can’t think how he survived the flight to Chaing Mai. That I’ll never know.” Nawin, to show proper deference to an older man and to prove to himself that he wasn’t churlish, looked toward the mirror and front windshield and gave the whole frontal world a nod. The boy born of the name Jatupon was bleeding inside him. His brain waves wiggled around like noodles. He was no better than this man. They both had been born poor with limited opportunities. He couldn’t laugh at him for any reason.

“Are you going international or domestic,” asked the driver of the twenty-five year old. Again there was a chortle. “Why does that question seem to make her laugh,” asked the taxi driver. “That is very strange. That is a strange young lady.”

“Krap,” said Nawin gruffly, “I don’t know why she is laughing.” “We are going international. Eva Airlines. Eva Airlines, an international flight to Japan,” reiterated Nawin. He kept it simple. He didn’t even want to think about Montreal. The thought of accompanying an animal, of sorts, to the other side of the world was too much. No sooner had he said it than she reminded them both of the fact that she would be going to her home first. Nawin had fallen into his own pensive inclinations but unlike them he wanted the completion of his thoughts. He was scanning his mutating neurological circuitry for a possible answer to the enigma whom he called his wife. Noppawan’s flippant comment that the stoplight wouldn’t get any greener as she smiled and shut the door on him and his whore troubled or inveigled him. One’s driveway wasn’t exactly equipped with a stoplight so that one sentence bordered on sarcasm. Her placid demeanor was like plastic and how she behaved belied everything so how was he to know if she was discontent with this arrangement if not jealous of it.

It was the first time that he would be leaving her to travel abroad. He had offered to delay the trip by a week or two until she had submitted her grades at Assumption University, which Thais called A-back. Maybe having his Porn stay over at their house the previous night was disrespectful to his wife but nice or offensive behavior was based upon one’s guesswork on how society would interpret such situations and unique situations like this were all the more impossible to judge. His wife was definitely different. That was for sure; but she was still a woman down deep even if she denied it just as his American passport and name-change made him abstain from bits of himself. A woman had instincts at suspecting a man’s activities. A woman had jealous rages and seductive lures that had a chance of keeping a man with her: genetic programming from hundreds or thousands of female ancestors who had experienced the promiscuity of husbands and were afraid that they and their children would not be properly taken care of. But there was certainly no chance of children. She slept with him a few times as husband and wife in a motion of fulfilled and completed consummation never to be repeated. Then she went in to get herself sterilized. Why she needed to do both was unclear. She was a mystery and steadfast in committing herself to that vow they had made to each other when they were 14 or 15 years old to not live petty lives. Such was the gray in the gray matter that enveloped them. Life with Noppawan had the insatiability of an itch to a mosquito’s bite and contained the same pleasurable discomfort.

“Taking a trip to Japan” thought the taxi driver sarcastically. He wasn’t certain how anyone could afford to go there. He was stuck to the boundaries of the car and he resented it; although from it, despite its limitations, he was always introduced to people so different than he was. They were the favored ones whose ideas were not curtailed to traffic jams exacerbated by infuriatingly influential traffic lights and accidents. Traffic accidents were such chaos because smashed cars could not be moved until insurance agents came to the scene to make their reports. Traffic policemen, who could easily be bribed, were never to be trusted. The favored people did not have everyday to roam the streets like homeless but highly mobile mendicants, their every movement enslaved and dictated by the pronouncement of street names called out from the back seat. “Do young people like you have money to go off wherever you wish?” The words pierced out of one who was pierced. The ache tore open like a tenuous newly heeled scar with the blade coming up to slit others. He knew that he had behaved contrary to social instinct but he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

“Don’t you know who this is?” asked the whore with arrogant vehemence.

The taxi driver looked in the rear view mirror at the brown-faced Nawin or Jatupon and asked, “No, should I know you?”

“No you shouldn’t. Neither one of us should know the other one. Just drive!” said Nawin although again he winced from his darker alter ego that only became him when he uttered its thoughts. He wasn’t totally devoid of societal programming of right and wrong no matter what he claimed to Noppawan. Being respectful to one’s elders and giving the prayerful gesture of the “wei” (pronounced as “why”) to one’s superiors did exist in him at certain times. He would always stand up for the tribute paid to the king prior to a movie although that was more from the idea of not offending the sensibilities of others around him or, less altruistically, getting himself possibly thrown out of the movie theatre. Furthermore, the Jatupon who had brought cups of ice to customers when he was a boy, the uneducated slave who had found himself spun up in noodles of sidewalk restaurants until he was 15, often began to stretch like a 26 year old fetus locked up in a heavily fortified placenta. He would feel how disparaged Jatupon often felt. He would feel guilt when he disparaged others that seeped into his veins while ghosts of yesteryear suddenly vexed him making him feel numb and cold inside.

He too wanted to stop thinking and he wished that his thoughts could be intruded with conversation. “I just mean that I’m nobody important. I paint a little. I’m going to Montreal for that reason.” The taxi driver was reticent. “Do you have many hours left driving today?” Nawin asked him. Still there was no answer. He threw the cigarette out of the opened window. “Do you want a stick of gum,” he asked the girl.

“I have a tick tack in my mouth now but I’ll take your gum and save it for later. You might not offer it again.” She giggled and he smiled at her with the tightness of his closed lips. She had lost her animal, and there she was as his seductress. He kissed her and returned the headphones over his ears. The savory taste of her mouth was in him.

Chapter 2

The acceleration that took them out of Huamark and through other adjacent sections of the city eventually led them to her area. He did not remember the name of it: Bangkae, Bangplad, Bang-something. He paid little attention to what his mistress said. Her voice often seemed the strident spluttering of burning fuel in an engine that couldn’t produce motion. King Ramkhamhaeng was a bygone entity. As soon as his model picked up some of her things that she had forgotten to bring with her the previous day and they had some breakfast, then Thailand would be a thing of the past too. For how long he didn’t know. He was married but it was one signature on many sheets of paper. The significance of spilled ink could not be read unless, like many superstitious Thais, he were to seek a fortuneteller-mendicant sitting on a sheet or straw mat on a sidewalk or in a park.

Noppawan had her chance to go with him. He had asked repeatedly. He had tacitly exhorted (mostly with his eyes) but she had refused him. Maybe she needed him to command her presence. Maybe in this nebulousness of strong selfishness and altruism called a personal relationship, so immediate and personal like finding oneself enveloped in smoking and fiery dust, she needed constant reminders that he cared about her more than any other entity selfishly and altruistically. That would be the woman in her if there were such a woman.

He tried to contemplate what love was like for normal people. It was surely a dust storm one invented in one’s mind to escape loneliness but then it became intertwined in more neediness and consciousness of the other’s feelings and thoughts so as not to be vanquished to aloneness. An individual who was able to overcome the grief of the loss of dopamine in the ephemeral and moribund high of being in love would cling to his former pleasure-inducer as a source of meaning in life’s vicissitudes. He and Noppawan had done the same but they were less like individuals finding themselves separately cast onto lifeboats in an ocean of random waves for they found oceans of thoughts within themselves that seemed more navigable to solid chunks of reality. They needed each other less; or so he thought.

Thai women generally had obsequious crying bouts in their rafts, but Noppawan, he argued, was not a woman. She was female without womanity. She was a female who advocated overcoming petty human existence for a love of ideals, compassion, and the attempts at understanding the human predicament. He couldn’t see into the future to know if he would be returning to Thailand anytime soon to be peered at through his wife’s thick dark framed glasses. At present there were only the wills of three individuals cowardly seeking meaning for themselves in a unit. There were only these socialized wills rolling along on a road in marginal darkness under the specious assumption that there really was a destination. The sensory input of traditional Thai music was coming to them from the front and back speakers of the car that was their confinement. The radio music, no matter if interpreted as harmonious or strident by the three individuals, was a levee helping to block their pervasive inundation of self-absorbing, mordant thoughts and reminded them (the patriot and the pending expatriates) of their commonality as Thais.

They passed a mall where he and Porn had gone shopping a month earlier. That day they had spent together there was the levity of the stroll and the shiny flash of credit cards in this Thai way of forgetting one’s impoverished roots. Feeling on top of the world, he comported the male gesture of having one arm clutching the other one behind his back. It was a gesture of affluence in the stroll of the shopper’s quest. At least twice when he encountered friends of his from Silpakorn Art University with bags in their hands he would talk to them for a half hour and somewhere into the talk he used another male gesture of affluence. He would slip a foot from a sandal and then slap it onto the floor loud as a firecracker. The sandal would hit the floor like a hand slapping against an impoverished peasant.

They stopped in an alley smaller than a side street called a “soi.” It was in between many Mom and Pop businesses and there, crowded within, was her apartment. He knew rooms like this well. They were rented out for fifteen or twenty dollars a month (600 or 700 baht), barren, hot, and unventilated as an attic. When she had gone in to get her bags he felt less lonely to be momentarily rid of her. Even now at age 26 but with thoughts at certain moments suffering and dragging like a man of 50, there was just himself, the real unit of one, and delude himself all he pleased he knew that he could not find anyone more significant than that. The only thing next to his heart, in the pocket of his shirt, were the slides of his art depicting the naked and dejected whores of Patpong that had ejaculated him into fame and puffed up a latent ego in himself that thought that he was a higher being than other Thais. He was keeping them there that day because he wanted to momentarily hand them over to airport authorities so they would not be harmed in airport security. When she returned with an added bag that the taxi driver plunked into the trunk the two men smiled at her and she smiled back. After all, Thailand was the land of smiles and every infant understood the advantages of smiling. To bypass his surly temperament and increase friendly relations, Nawin offered more breath fresheners or chewing gum for everyone. No Thai would refuse such friendly gestures and the two of them took from his hand greedily like tamed birds. Then he began his old contemplation of why 2 was greater than 1 or why 3 was greater than 2. It was an old argument of his wife. The first time she posed it to him they both were 16 years old. He had made the mistake of asking her to a dance. “Why do two things coming in close proximity to each other have greater value?” she asked. His only response had been “A le nah?” meaning “What did you say?” Neither one of them went to the dance but straight to their bedrooms and their sullen thoughts.

Porn was, according to his thinking, an “all right whore.” She didn’t cause him any problems at all and it was for this reason that he carried her along with him as a personification of his intellectual decadence thereby increasing public intrigue with him. She was the pretty doll he could swing about as a reminder of his one-man school of art. He, Nawin Biadklang, could flaunt her around as the premier example of the dark vision in his mind and the sexual slavery of his nation all meshed together. He would have to draw a lot in Montreal and sell everything he painted to pay for any expenses the scholarship would not cover. She preferred her title of model. He was not so heartless to deny her this euphemism. She successfully relieved him of the tension of his body and to be emitted of it like a squeezed tangerine in such a good rhythmic fingering would well compensate for the stress level of having to spend so much time with her. He desired her a lot of the time so by most accounts of love he did truly love her. Foremost, Noppawan did not object to her. Matter of fact, she wanted Porn to relieve him. She wanted him squeezed. She wanted the pus squished from his brain without having to get dirty. She wanted to continuously wear the glasses that caged her tepid orbs and to not succumb them to rapturous non-Buddhist primal yearnings. She did not care to dodge the aloneness of her thoughts through a rapturous delusion that she was one partial being made whole in sex and love. And yet by her account she did not want to mandate his awareness. It was only by tripping on shadows and feeling vapid equanimity that came after having absurdly given oneself over so entirely to the sensation of pulling on one’s genitalia that a man actually knew anything.

This whore was and was not his typical whorehouse girl. On the day of their first meeting he had been sketching runners and trees at a stadium near Assumption University where his wife taught. His head was resting in a fog until she materialized. There she was casting a shadow onto the sun that was sedating him and wrapping him into himself in sleep. There she was questioning him on his art and pointing out her mommy, a skinny and frail thing, sitting on the other set of bleachers.

He found out that she was a dancer. There was no surprise there. Her flirtatious gestures and the presence of her frail mommy looking over at them and hoping the purchase would take place were tacit but undeniable clues that she was poor and wanted a male companion. That was no surprise either. Yet beyond this calculated small talk or artifice was an ingenuous mouth that glistened in guileless desire. She was a money girl. That was obvious, and yet there was more. There was infatuation and an accompanying mommy who was like an SOS. Porn was a whore, but if he hadn’t been married, she could have been more. Except for Noppawan, who was a flagrant novelty, he couldn’t quite decipher how whores and wives were all that different. Both baited the man for the fecundity of prosperity and progeny. It was a survival response that was selfish in base primeval instincts. It was human and beautiful. It was filled with womanity.

She turned up the volume on her tape recorder and repeated, “Excusez-moi; au revoir; oui; toilletes; papier hygienique.”

“Was that the main reason for coming to your apartment: for the tape recorder?” he asked.

She turned off the machine without the least concern about a distraction deferring her scholarship. “Oui,” she said, “but also my favorite blouse, jeans, a necklace-see, isn’t it beautiful—lots of things. A tape recorder is rather important, I think. You don’t want me to be unable to talk.” He nodded his head as he frowned wishing that she couldn’t speak at all. She would have been all the more beautiful mute and deaf. He had proposed getting up early initially to compensate for his slow, pokey movements but not as early as this and he resented having lost sleep for such knicknacks. He didn’t feel that he should be subject to listening to her palaver in Canada. His nod was that of acquiescence the way the King Ramas had agreed with planned activities of the imperialists to divert their attention. He, however, was trying to divert a headache. He looked at the booklet that was on her lap. She was unsuccessfully trying to imitate a product published in Thailand as he had guessed a minute earlier from the fact that the speaker on the tape sounded Thai. It was the blind leading the blind, he thought.

“You do know some English, don’t you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. He could imagine the palaver she would be saying on the streets of Montreal and he yearned for his wife, Noppawan. He got the taxi driver to turn right and park on the side of a street. His eyes were fixed on a barren serenity of gravel and weeds that was in the vicinity of a pier. The sun was now rising fully and aided by a golden roofed temple on the other side of the river, there was a silvery and golden glaze in the waters camouflaging the sooty sediments that were diluted within. He wanted to go to the gravel and eat along the side of begging dogs of which the bodies were deflating like tires. He wanted to sit at one of the red metallic tables on a plastic stool among a group of saffron robed monks, with the scents of rice or noodles penetrating his nostrils. He had to smile that such an aversion as twenty baht meals still called to him pleasantly because they were the foundation of memories that constituted his verdant youth.

“What are we doing?” she asked

“We’re eating,” he said. “Come on, it will be fun to act like common people,” he chuckled.

“Common. I know common. Common is having a treat of eating fried insects on the dirt road, Nawin. Common is sleeping on a rug because you don’t have a bed. Common is praying for the opportunity of having one’s sandals fall apart or getting them trapped deep into the soil of the rice field so as to have an excuse to get out of the hamlet. Occasionally we paid an arm and a leg to the owner of a truck who came once a day ten miles down a muddy road to pick people up. Common, Nawin, is collecting rain water in those big ceramic tubs that sit in front of the house, being stingy with every drop of water when you wash your body, and then go to bed exhausted without even eating dinner. Common is getting up at 5 a.m. to feed the water buffalo so that at 6 a.m. your father can use it to plow the field. You don’t know anything about the word.”

He did know. He bled from knowledge but he frowned and for a moment he was taciturn fighting back anger and memories. “Well, do whatever you damn well please. I need out of this car and that is what I’m doing. You can feast on what remains of the breath fresheners. I for one am dining out. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“When do we need to get on the plane?”

“There’s plenty of time,” he said. “Plenty of time to eat another meal in the airport before departing. You’ll get a high price western meal at the airport. I guarantee it.” He left the taxi and sat down meditating on the river flowing at a distance. Soon the anger dissolved and his memories were imprisoned.

The idea of paying on a taxi where the meter continued to rise without his presence enthralled him. Having lots of money was a novelty and flaunting this novelty to patrician and plebian, proletariat and CEO alike still engrossed him. Thais were culturally programmed to give the “wei” to the Buddha and the monk but in their hearts that steamed with greed as they cooked their food on the streets, sold their trinkets from their sheets, worked in office jobs, were government officers, part of an educated middle class, and a million other activities, classifications, and identities, this traditional greeting with the folded hands in front of the face was deeply given in the secret regions of subconscious ideas for those whom they thought of as rich. And as he ate his pork laden noodle soup while the meter ticked on he picked out the pork to feed the dogs; but in so doing he glimpsed someone. Past the gravel were sidewalks and stores and further was a department store. Next to it, beyond the gaunt old woman on the sheet selling and squeezing rubber duckies in the hope of selling a few and having money to eat, a man clanging bells with handless hooks above his cup, shoe repairmen fixing soles, a kiosk of a key maker, and a blind mendicant with a speaker and a microphone singing a strident folk tune, was someone. It was a person who turned him to stone, froze him like an iceberg, mortified him, and pulled out his wounded child. It was a strange composite: at one moment appearing a bit like his brother, Kazem, and at one moment like the youngest of his elder brothers, Suthep. For a second or two as he saw this cook at a distance, he couldn’t remember the name of Suthep-he who had been so innocuous but in his apathy had harmed him the most. Ten or eleven years had gone by. He wondered how he was supposed to know anymore: was this man one or the other or neither of them. Another blind beggar began to sing a song in a microphone linked to a portable speaker. He was being led by his wife. They came to his table singing a louder song more stridently than the one he heard at a distance. The sun was feeling hot and it made him dizzy and mad as Akhenaten in Ancient Egypt. Nawin, the legal alias of Jatupon, was feeling a weight death. His whole ideas and feelings were discombobulated. He took out twenty baht wedging it under the canister containing vinegar and peppers. He walked quickly to the car and cowered himself in the back seat in movement toward the airport.

Book II: Many Lifetimes Ago

Chapter 3

Their parents were dead; the cremation ceremony was over, and life went on: he internally recited, swallowed his whispered whit of air, and regurgitated the aphorism. Its cold, laconic and impersonal meaning was assumed an efficacy to change on this propelling Earth like the odious taste of medicine and so he could not fail to believe that it was true since there was nothing to his knowledge to replace it with. The present moment ravished and trashed all former beings and, like a mountebank, sold its new products as the true goods. To Jatupon, the youngest, there was a vermilion color to the day. It was no wonder. The present had come upon him as inconspicuously as the gait of the monk’s orange robe in the subtle movements that philosopher made during their time of mourning.

Carrying suitcases and bags with his brothers and a woman of Chinese complexion, he sensed the rapacious discord of Bangkok—virulent and paralyzing as ennui for the rich and servitude for the poor—and so he lagged behind them. There had been a time that he would have sniffed at this new city like one of the myriad crazed but gently starving dogs (after all, in certain areas of the streets, pheromones and urinary molecules dominated over the odors of car exhausts) but, as he guessed, Bangkok was always more tempting from afar. Even though he had repined for a more promised land he did not expect that even if he were to live somewhere in “Euro-American Bangkok” (Banglampool, Silom, and Sukumvit roads with their seven day a week travelers check cashing windows) his life would be any different than his situation at present; nor would it be any worse than his life in Ayutthaya unless he were to starve.

Still, he felt apprehension; and like a restive boy he slowly dragged his suitcases. He imagined remote Hill Tribe villages on the sidewalks and himself taking his suitcases through the bedrooms of naked girls as if, like one of the kings of the Chakri dynasty with his many wives, he were to declare to them “Honeys, I’m home.” The dreaminess belied a gloom. If Jatupon were to think of one positive trait about himself that late afternoon he might have thought that the ejaculation of his semen, which he conducted alone, disgorged extremely far—so far he had sunk into a shaky gray within himself that he couldn’t see outside of any void unless it had a rope attached to it. Even the fetid air intimidated him. He felt intellectually obtuse. He was like a dog carried by an owner (a woman in a skirt, riding side saddle on a motorcycle) that squealed its head off when the motorcycle skid and floundered onto one side.

Staring down as his brothers, his owners, pulled the invisible leash, he knew that they condemned him, the laggard; and nominally, that condemnation made him feel compelled to look down more often than he would have done otherwise. Still, when they crossed over to another sidewalk bustling with pedestrians he was forced to look up since he was inadvertently bowling his suitcases against the pins of strangers. In so doing, he noticed a store windowsill besieged by an orderly society of ants. He was beginning to acknowledge that Buddhist principles were curtailed by reality: a few ants allowed to live with a human became a hundred easily; multiplying mosquitoes brought disease and pain, and one’s immune system killed bacteria, viruses, and protozoa because murder was stamped into the natural order that no human will could bypass. And yet this demonstrated that the Earth, herself, was alive and full of creative potential. It was this mesmerizing dynamism that most lured his eyes.

The city was fetid as his older brother’s shoes in the back of his girl friend’s car (the car that had brought them here); and yet its billboards and tall buildings were opulent. He imagined them glazed in morbidly saffron or vermilion dust the color of a monk’s robe and the color of blood and death. All the pedestrians were individually and rapaciously galvanized but banging against each other less systematically than the ants. They were ebullient like the bouncing of hair on a schoolgirl’s back since most of them were shoppers.

The brothers and the Chinese Thai woman passed another street. Near it was the edge of a small park with one blended shadow of the fronds of palm trees spread out among a patch of grass and providing a visual respite from traffic exhaust and pavement that seemed to define the city. Here he was slithering about like a snake acclimating to both a foreign environment and the alien skin that he was now wearing. These three weeks had made him unreal. His parents had ridden in the car alone; there was the car accident; then a cremation and the selling of property; the drive from Ayutthaya; the night at someone’s house in some type of a fever or hallucination; mosquito bites under a net; and himself turning into some type of caricature in a comic book or cartoon.

Whereas many other boys had books and knowledge he had his comics. He didn’t know anything about the techniques of art although he had thumbed through some pictures from a book at a library in Ayutthaya. He had never even been exposed to algebra or other intellectual exercises that brought one in touch (so to speak) with abstract realities. He had heard of the Internet and assumed it was the brand name of a certain computer but wished to know for sure. He knew that his poverty created his ignorance and felt his ignorance made him stupid. For him there was nothing but day to day living twisting about like a noodle fried in the juice of itself under the hot Thailand sun.

There was a secondary trait about him that despite his bleakly gray and vermilion self-deprecation he was pleased that he possessed. His 14 years of life had provided him with at least enough acclimating instinct or reflexes that, as they crossed the road, zigzagging through stalled traffic, his feet and ears performed a specific cautionary duality of quickness in speed and breaks. This allowed him to retreat from motorcycles without headlights that were swerving around multiple lanes of cars. Even within Ayutthaya, which was conspicuously absent of operable traffic lights, he had never had an accident. There was that time that he had flown off of a motorcycle taxi and over a vendor who had been wheeling his cart when the motorcycle had run into his toasted buns glazed in feces-tinted Ovaltine, but that was a different type of incident altogether.

Across the street culinary workers of the sidewalk poured soup and scooped rice dishes into plastic bags sealed with rubber bands or put the plates of food on metallic tables. So many city residents (all of whom lived in apartments) did not possess kitchens from some law or another. This, he supposed, was good. It had provided he and his family with an existence. It did the same for them. One worker who rested on a red stool enthralled him. Without any specific gestures or words sent to him, he nonetheless felt her listlessness and knew her anguish. He knew the 4000 baht that many indigent souls received. It was their permit to live; and to get this permit to ride in life they had to harness and ensnare the creative force that had conceived them and were them, and then allow themselves to be subservient seven days a week in their robotic roles of reflexes. He saw another one wring out a washcloth and clean another table. He could imagine her travail just as he understood the travail of those around him on overpasses: the emaciated elderly with cups in their hands seemed to cluster on and under every pedestrian overpass. To be homeless, he thought, would be more horrific than the moments at one’s death: a travail of being worthless and lost, where dangling blue from a rope inveigled the imagination that could not fathom a means to get 6000 baht and pull oneself off of a park bench. He felt: “I have been where you are with a hair net on my head, many late nights splintered on a wooden stool, or placid on a red plastic stool, strength thwarted, and with angular crowds stumbling over me.” Almost without thinking it, he felt the horror as he struggled for words; and since he did not have his journal with him, he tried to memorize the feeling.

He remembered those years of nights in Ayutthaya when his work had ended and he was free of the vending cart, and embraced within the black smog of busses. Then there was a reprieve from the gaseous smoke of cooked food (grilled pork and chicken) trapped between canopy roofs and sidewalk. His reprieve and liberation was only in comics borrowed from a newsstand. It was a personal life—a bit of himself in a vicarious existence. The words under the pictures would often zoom across the interior of his skull in his drowsiness like cars on a speedway and he would not comprehend anything much before falling asleep at one of the tables. In sleep he would not exist. Cartoon images would run amuck. His pent up needs would flow in action and adventure although his likeness would not be in the dreams.

If thought were a product made from the raw material of feeling, he felt more than thought: “Your reflexive and monotonous perfunctory days and nights are gloomy in starlessness. Face draped on the backs of your hands folded on the table, you almost look as if you are making the gesture of ‘wei’ or praying to Buddha.” He remembered that seconds before he was in those minutes of sleep, at the end of the work nights, he prayed for a way out or that community and connectedness could be gained within his limited life. He walked by the stranger. He walked past twenty others. With his eyes he bestowed onto them blessings.

He continued to follow his brothers through perennial steps and time and swayed alone as lifeless as wet laundry hanging on balconies during the dry season. The fetid one slammed him with poignant expletives to which the second eldest smiled and nodded his head. Suthep, however, had childish sensitivities of his own that life had not yet hacked from him but when Jatupon quickened his pace to walk near him Suthep looked over toward him with silent rage. Jatupon just turned away and sucked in his bottom lip. It was true that weeks had passed since the death of their parents and it was so that life went on—that it was quickly manufactured and quickly hit the dust bin like any worn out or broken commodity; but, he argued to himself, an admission of their own pain and a kind smile would have helped to keep his boyhood suppressed and his manhood poised.

Jatupon was still nonplused. The present was an undercurrent in his inundating thoughts. His vision was often cracked and misted in suppressed tears and his eyes burned from his sweat seeping into them. He felt disoriented and although it was apparent, it didn’t seem to evoke sympathy. In virtually his first words that day he hoarsely spoke incommunicably, cleared his throat, and then yelled over to Kazem, the second eldest, that he needed to go to the bathroom. Kazem stopped walking and told the youngest, Jatupon (to whom he nicknamed “Jatuporn”), to hold his water until they were “home.” The word “home” did not make any impression on the youngest who was now wondering if they would be spending the rest of their lives walking in this fashion.

He felt that they were sinking in an abyss of negative probabilities. Concerning the pejorative comment about holding his water, it was no worse than being called “Jatuporn.” He was used to it.

A facial muscle below Kazem’s left eye began to twitch immediately before they again started walking. Conscious of Kazem’s disposition, Jatupon became less disconcerted and more guarded, hurrying but maintaining a consistent space between himself and his brothers. How strange, Jatupon thought, that the fetid one did not have the same physical antagonism: it was strictly mental as if the thought of the youngest was so repugnant as to be beyond a physical response. He began to stumble with the bags until Kumpee’s girlfriend stopped their advancement to help him carry some of his load. Her smile was wide against her pale pigment; and her Chinese complexion looked at odds to Kumpee, the oldest and darkest of the fraternal misadventurers. Jatupon was jealous of her relationship with the fetid one but this gesture of pulling away from his brothers to take one of his bags ameliorated any negativity that the appearance had not counteracted.

The journey from the parking garage and down through the hectic whims of Bangkok traffic seemed inordinately long to him and silently he objected to being led this way forfeiting friends and consistency he had always known in Ayuttaya. The sidewalk and road went over a canal. A woman with baskets of fruit dangling from the ends of a bamboo pole that was on her shoulders must have made Kumpee’s girlfriend hungry since no sooner was she back with her beau than the exigency of eating had driven the herd to seek a bowl of tom yam soup with noodles. Under the canvas, eating and sinking morbidly into himself as he looked out over the cabin-shacks that were along the canal, he listened to Kumpee and Kazem.

“You’re the one who wanted to move here and so I said, ‘Yes, little brother. Let me fulfill your wishes and needs. It is my duty as an elder brother.”

“I never said that.”

“You were always saying that.”

“Back up. That was before the accident and it was just talk.”

“Man, you did not make any objections. We sold off their things and there wasn’t one objection from any of you.”

“I didn’t know then that you would be pocketing the money.”

“In other words, you wanted to move over here and now that we are over here you are raising objections as if now we should just get back into the car and go back. That is crazy.”

“I was in a daze. I admit it. I let you lead us around. We don’t even know anyone here.”

“That isn’t entirely true; but even if it turns out that he doesn’t help us any at least we are in a large city where there are more opportunities than working in restaurants like this one.”

“ I want that money-or a share of it at anyway.”

“For what?”

“So that I won’t have to beg for a bowl of soup in places like this-so that if you and Natenapa take off somewhere” (Kumpee’s girlfriend, who was listening to them, now looked away and reached for the pitcher of water that was at the table) “that the money doesn’t go with you.” She poured water into her glass, sipped it once, and reached into her purse for her makeup.

“It is Thai tradition that the eldest brother is supposed to keep the inheritance for the younger ones. If you question that you don’t have any sense of right and wrong. If you have a problem with that you have a problem with the way things are and have always been. But even if I were to run away tomorrow you wouldn’t have lost much. None of it was worth anything. Look at these jeans with the holes in the knees and the pockets. If I want to start spending everything for myself I would have started with some new clothes and instead of dragging you to Bangkok with me I would have left all of you in Ayutthaya, wouldn’t I?”

“You buy jeans and cut out the areas around the knees so that doesn’t prove much. Just see to it that the money doesn’t fall from the holes and that you keep remembering the duties of an elder brother to the younger ones.”

On foot again with his brothers and the China woman, he kept wishing to be a boy that year that his parents opened what they referred to as a real restaurant. He wished for the strange faces in the familiar space: an area no different than a garage with some metallic tables and chairs in the center and woks, burners, a refrigerator, and Coke machine in the front. It had taken the family so many years of working on the street to be able to afford this space. This restaurant was more legitimate and less beggarly in appearance although not exempt from taxes. His parents were exhilarated for a while until they discovered that the added customers only compensated for rent and taxation and the same subsistence level prevailed. Soon the mundane set in and the discomfort of working on the streets was forgotten. Then he thought of a better time: that sweet time that very young children have in harmony with the parents’ wishes and the fruition of love. He could see himself pouring ice and water into small metallic cups and bringing them to the customers on the sidewalk or making his foray into salesmanship by draping from his arms the jasmine rosaries that his mother linked together from a long needle.

One day, as that boy, had he not just looked down briefly to zip his pants and found that they did not fit all that well; and that, no longer a cute or special one, he wasn’t the same (or wasn’t perceived the same) being within his new clothes? A metamorphosis had altered him to a taller and more aggravating expense and only by working hard could he avert the faces of scorn. In those years in some bedroom or another he found some peace. The plastic blinds had the same sounds of fingers wedged between them as they bounced around in the December breeze or in a June storm; and the piecemeal environment seen in the crevices of those blinds were of the same trash cans on the same pavement near some gravel. That had been reassuring to him. Now, he had been extracted from that environment.

Walking on, morose as the abyss of his subconscious disgorged like a geyser, he thought of his boyhood in school satiated in learning. There had indeed been such a boyhood in such a time brief as a few days of Bangkok winter that makes homeless dogs and cats shiver before temple walls when fortunate enough to wander into such an animal sanctuary. Learning had been a series of refreshing stimuli slapping up against him like a cool breeze. It had stimulated him and had planted in him an appetite. It was then taken away from him leaving only the wistfulness and the barren days squirming around like noodles in pork soup. At the aunt’s insistence his mother and father had paid for him to go to a poor Buddhist school run by the monks. The monks had been impressed by his academic cleverness, and soon, at their persuasion, his parents had paid for him to attend special classes as well. During those three years he had only worked in the summers; and the last of those summers was the end to a consistent time of academic learning. They rented him off to pick coconuts from a woman’s orchard and didn’t see much point in dismissing the added revenue. The aunt, with her excess of money, intervened with special tutors and home-school teachers. It lasted for a time until she became bored with overseeing it.

During the trip here an accident had occurred on the highway from Ayuttaya to Bangkok and the congestion made irascible beings used to the quick weltering motion of freedom trapped in their own thoughts. Horns, at that time sounded from all directions and Kumpee, the fetid one, at times irascibly chewed the fetid fruit called durian or slowly slurped from the beer can in his hands allowing the liquid in his mouth to spread and re-spread before swallowing. He wanted to step out of the car and punch someone but instead he bit into the heart of the durian. When the girlfriend’s car gained enough freedom to interweave within the slowness (a slowness that caused their minds to be more lamenting), Kumpee, at that time, made their way out of the last lanes and pulled into a town to get another beer. He had hardly entered the town when he fell asleep for a second and swerving to escape hitting a tuc tuc upon awakening (a tuc tuc being a big golf-cart taxi) or a bicycle rickshaw, the car nearly hit a truck and then nicked a fruit cart that was being pushed along the side of the road. Kumpee, burdened and desiring for speed and escape, drove on. During that second of the near miss with the truck, Jatupon felt that it was their destiny—their karma—to have the same fate that their parents had experienced weeks earlier. He found himself disappointed to be alive but sensed that he was alone in this. Even if such a thought flashed before his brothers, they were older and quickly regained that cold detachment as if their psyches were fully evolved as separate entities. They portrayed, in legitimate or feigned smiles, that they no longer felt that the fate of the parents was interlinked to that of the sons. Suthep, who was just a year and a half older than Jatupon, had not been so convincing. When he felt that he was unobserved he seemed troubled and twice looked out the back window.

Kumpee, deciding to sleep, drove a little further in the same direction to his friend’s house. He was apologetic. After all, Bangkok (or Krung Thep Maha Nakhon) was only 45 miles from Nakhon Si Ayutthaya but to experience traffic problems in Thailand was like no other, and to have sold the parents’ possessions after burning the bodies of the mother and father before the inevitable rot (a ubiquitous ordeal so individually personal) was like no other. They were exhausted and needed someplace to stay. The friend welcomed them in without the least reservation. Kumpee and Kazem put rice mats on the floor. Then they began to tie up the tent of the mosquito net by stringing it up against light fixtures and unused nails that stuck out of walls. Suthep and Jatupon became aware that their masculine images of themselves were dependent on being a builder of the house, and so they quickly secured two sagging corners so that they would not be badgered for feminine subservience.

That night, under the net, Jatupon considered the mosquito stealth: that it waited for the concluding restless mumbling of his two eldest brothers who were rehashing where they would go long-term and what they would do. The mosquito waited; and the minute that they fell asleep its wings cut through the black air and time with the buzz of a monotonous chant. The mosquito carried a wicker fan called a “balabot” that monks used to hide their faces as they gave the air their morbid and sonorous drones. He heard the mosquito shuffling around the room under the net. There were times, throughout the night, that he questioned if some less supernatural version of a mosquito had bitten him and had given him dengue fever which might have brought on these hallucinations, or if he was experiencing withdrawal from not having used drugs or sniffed glue for a while. It did not occur to him that a third possibility might have been the variety of chemical substances already in his body mixed with the new amphetamines that he had popped into his mouth an hour earlier while in the bathroom of Kumpee’s friend. It was a well-known fact that metropolitan bus drivers in every city popped amphetamines; and so to him it had been vitamins fortifying him against depression and lethargy.

As he walked with his brothers and the “Chinawoman” through the heat and smoke of the sidewalk restaurants, he remembered having been very hot the previous night and how he had felt so miserably trapped under the mosquito net like a fish in the web and snare of its net. He was sick but it did not last for very long. According to his memory this strange entity as large as himself shuffled under the net from one corner to the next and the sickness of his stomach was replaced by a queasy and tightening horror while he cowered in the embrace of his legs. Thinking himself in a net where there was no extrication he experienced the adrenalin of bravado. He wanted to confront his fears. Trying to reach for a religion to formulate a rational perspective in the irrational, he argued that the snare outside had to be less poignant than the snare of gluttonous appetites that were the cell, the bunk, and the chained wall within the underground prison that was he. This mosquito evoked in him, or he invoked in himself, such trepidation that he imagined an equal: prehistoric peoples of Thailand watching their halcyon harmony with nature execrably disparaged in the vehement winds of a hurricane—the trees along the river, which had offered protection now torn and lethally slapped at them.

The mosquito landed, crawled, and looked at the bodies on the floor. “Everyone is separated out into little forts. The others are under two different nets,” it flared its voice in a quasi-question without looking at Jatupon’s face. “Who are these creatures?” it asked.

“My brothers”

“There’s one woman,” it said pugnaciously. “They can’t all be your brothers. Let’s have an inventory. Be specific!”

“My eldest brother’s friend and my brother, Kazem, are under one tent. My brother, Kumpee, and his girlfriend are in a second tent. My brother, Suthep, is here with me.”

“And you I know. Don’t you think this is a bit overdone: three forts around a few microscopic insects?”

Jatupon opened his mouth but failed to say anything. Then he closed his mouth in fear of an insect flying into it.

“At any rate, why isn’t one tent used throughout the room.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Aren’t you a little dummy,” it said. “Considering the fact that one large tent spread throughout the room would be a more economical investment than three smaller ones, one would think that you would care to inquire about it logically.”

“We aren’t renting them. They are the host’s and it would be impolite to ask such questions.”

“‘They are the host’s and it wouldn’t be polite to ask those questions,’” it mocked. “You are so Thai through and through: one dummy in a nation of dummies. Here, let me look at this dummy.”

After a thorough examination of Suthep’s body like a doctor or a depraved sexual stalker, it turned away from the one sleeping and spoke Jatupon’s disparaging nickname of “Jatuporn” disdainfully. Then it told him that he and it would be playing cards. It shuffled its body from corner to corner and then shuffled the cards. One card became thwarted and dislodged from the uniform movement. It flipped face up and showed a still life of his parents who were expressionless as mannequins. They were a couple of a dark pigment (he from birth and she with her Chinese skin all burnt and wrinkled brown). She was naked but wearing a hair net and he was without his usual cap but was wearing a loincloth that had been soiled by his weekend work in the rice fields in the rural outskirts of the city. The mosquito quickly buried the card into the others face down.

“Lets talk of them, the ashes that they be. They make up one of two groups of people in your life and these categories of individuals need to be discussed.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Seeing them makes me miss them. They died in a horrible accident.”

“Accidents abound.”

“ We had to burn their bodies.”

“That’s done. You don’t want them rotting in the streets. From what I heard, they made excellent firewood in the incinerator. What is there to cry about? They fulfilled the quest of their lives. It was the only decent thing they ever did: becoming a fireball. What is there to cry about?”

“They are gone. They were my parents and I loved them.”

“You are sorry for the pain they experienced. I suppose that is decent of you; but most of that love is just like not questioning why there are three nets in this room instead of one. You, Thais, are so subservient to your cultural definitions of right and wrong. What silly things you all are. You are specifically foolish having the loyalty of a dog that is kicked, fed, and comes back for more. You are too Thai. It is absolutely sickening.” It again glanced at Suthep. “Tell me about this one on the mat with you. Is he as stupid?”

“Are you going to hurt him and me?”

“Possibly; or just allow you to hurt yourselves.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He is the third eldest brother. He is a litter older than me. He likes Thai boxing and snookers. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you want. He is my brother. I love him.”

“There you go with that word. Do you think that they, your parents, loved you?”

“Of course.”

“That’s what you think but that isn’t what you know. I want what you know from what you have repressed. I want the truth. I want to enlighten you, or for you to enlighten yourself. It’s a misnomer, you know. It isn’t really light at all in either color or weight. Enlightenment is hard and dark. Don’t you think so?”

“I’ve never considered it.”

“I know you haven’t.” It paused. “You know, I can read your thoughts. Why are you trying to memorize everything I’m saying. You flatter me so.”

“I want to put it in my journal but it is buried in one of my bags.”

“I see. I’m glad you write. I think you should write or draw.”

“Why?”

“Why not? As an indictment of love if nothing else. I’m wondering what you think about your mother having four sons. Really five including the miscarriage.”

“I wouldn’t know. I suppose she loved Children. She loved raising them.”

“She needed children. Not only did her body push her to make copies of herself to preserve her DNA but also she needed the distractions from her own thinking-from love gone awry. She had married a tyrant. The only thing they shared was the scheming of easily cobbled projects to make a tiny bit of money they always hoped would make them filthy rich. The rebellion against her family and sexual felicity with his large genitalia had been eroded in time. She became conscious of his piggish habits. She was always thinking about being alienated from her former family, which, if she had stayed with them, would have allowed her to live a comfortable life. Children were her distraction but when they were older she resented their independence. As far as your father is concerned, he loved you even more: he loved chasing after you as if you were a cockroach that he wanted to smash. He got your brothers to help him stomp on you.”

“How do you know that the need to preserve DNA makes a mother love?” Jatupon whined sullenly.

“I read it in a comic book.”

Jatupon became taciturn. His head hurt and he wanted to vomit. He couldn’t get up. He tried to stand up but couldn’t do so. He tried to vomit in a cup but nothing came up.”

“You might as well stay where you are at. If you go into the bathroom for more pills or slip into your bag for some glue you might be able to discombobulate my voice like a child spinning around in the grass but ultimately you’ll fall into me and the mordant words will be all the more deleterious. Besides, it is still my hand and there are more cards to play. It tossed another card from the deck his way. It was Kumpee’s girl friend. It was her face and shape.

“Yes, Jatupon said, “She’s a lovely card” and the mosquito nodded his head disdainfully. Then it clapped its feet and said, “One baht for the human’s ability to at least recognize physical beauty.” Jatupon looked on the table and there appeared a one baht coin with a naked China woman engraved on it. He picked it up. It’s weight, which was always equal to that of play money, had become less; and there was a continual sensation that even though it rested in his finger tips it was being pulled lightlessly away from him to fall endlessly into an inconvertible currency. He watched it vaporize into a gas.

“She is one of the second group who has no special significance to you at all and yet from her your life has been changed. People like this might be helpful and even compassionate but at the end of the day they won’t stay with you. They are evanescent nectar in the dissolution of events and time.”

“Only two groups?”

“Only two unless you make up a third. All I know of the future is from the perspective of today.”

Catered to the limitations of Jatupon’s entomological knowledge, this gigantic mosquito was male and a bloodsucker nonetheless. It looked into his intimate space with such a bold stare that he felt that it could easily seduce him in as its prey—that the survival of the fittest reigned with the hegemony of its kind just as micro-organisms always get the last meal. As he saw its eyes he suddenly knew the sadistic fun it was having with its mind games, and the cruel hunting games of cats and their dead mice. Deeper into its eyes he saw a starving child and a vulture awaiting on a rock, the fight for dominion of species and nations, and the sexual aggression of making love among mankind. He felt like walking meat; and he knew that all animals felt the same of their own lives ceaselessly. He grieved for them. The mosquito knew this intuitively and began to laugh at him for his sensitivity and his na�ve animistic thinking, which like a child, made animals conscious and sagacious.

“You aren’t real, you know, but the fever of my own brain,” said Jatupon to curtail his vision.

“Oh, let’s not start the reality game. I’ll make this simple so that even you can understand it. It foils others I enlighten who give me the same argument. I say to them that they, who create ideas, will die in a hundred years but an idea that they might have has the possibility of living on. To the idea, I say, the man would not seem real.” Then he obfuscated. “Didn’t you read in an encyclopedia one time that the American president, Abraham Lincoln, said, ‘In the civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose.’”

“I don’t understand what you are meaning by that. I didn’t understand that long sentence when I read it anyhow.”

“You don’t understand subtle and abstract meanings because you are uneducated. You sometimes dabble here and there with an encyclopedia in the library and then you forget everything you’ve read when you understand it at all,” said the mosquito in a contumelious air. “Only the dreamer is the illusion. Not the dream. The dreamer sinks back with the dirt.”

It tossed that card like a coin from its gangling talon tips. The card enlarged to a life-sized form and moved toward Jatupon. He almost felt seduced by it as it moved around him in its mating dance. The mosquito laughed harder and then said that not only had he and his brothers relinquished their homeland in Ayutthaya on account of her but that she was a trap or a symbol of a trap. It was not just she, he explained. It was all of them. Love and marriage was a specie ** specie ? or species ? ** preserving drug induced into a man to keep him bound and limited through passion, fear of loneliness, and obligation.”

“Then I should feel sorry for my elder brother if it is a sickness like how I’m feeling now. I mean I was feeling really sick but now I must still be sick if I’m imagining you. I wish I were able to tell what is happening to me now. It is like suffering the withdrawals or dengue fever.” Slowly forcing himself beyond his cowardly pose, Jatupon got up and opened his suitcase. He took out two warm cans of Coca Cola. He opened the tabs and slid one to the mosquito that drank up.

“It isn’t quite the nectar of blood but it is okay when one is thirsty,” it commented.

He was like a wounded soldier who perceived that the enemy was another victim in the war and so he wanted to sit down near this opposing peer. Jatupon crept near it and gradually sat on a mat. A minute later, after not being eaten, his confidence grew and he felt like confessing his soul to the insect as if the mosquito’s appearance were only that mask Thai monks hid behind when they said their chants. “Kumpee said he would live with us but I guess he might mean that now. After all, his girlfriend is with him. He only talked to her on our way here.” He paused and thought deeply once again. “I don’t like what you say but it’s honest. I have no one to talk with, you know.” He thought of this mosquito as a spirit who came through the burning of incense placed at a stupa. “I don’t have anyone to be honest with me and all of the friends I once had I’ve had to leave. Would you visit me in Bangkok?” He spoke with such innocence that the mosquito had to smile bashfully and look away from the awkwardness of knowing that only a child believes that mother and father are extensions of his own body; only a child walks into the forest with a kind stranger where he is bound to a tree, raped and murdered; and only one warped in the wisdom gained in tragedy finds himself inseparably bound by every stern, euphonious truth uttered by a monster.

“Would I accept the invitation to come to Bangkok to bite you and inject you with malaria? No, I’m afraid I would not be able to accept such an invitation at this time and you shouldn’t be extending it. Always remember that truth is lethal. To know and to be aware of many things is like a man too fat for his house and this obese pig of a man is forced onto the streets where he can’t tolerate the heat and cold because of his flab; and then I come along and suck through his baboonish skin before he knocks off. I certainly would accompany you if it were not for there being truth in the adage that a mosquito could never live in Bangkok because the pollution would kill him off.”

Then the mosquito’s eyes were those of the second eldest brother, Kazem, and Jatupon was with him in the bathroom where he had taken the pills. Kazem lifted up “Jatuporn’s” bare legs onto his shoulders; inserted himself; and rode. Jatupon realized that he was hallucinating this because there was the mosquito before him. He felt ill. He just wanted to get out of the confines of the mosquito net. He just wanted to brush his teeth.

The next thing Jatupon dreamt or knew the third eldest one, Suthep, put a cold washcloth on his forehead and then had him take some aspirin. As Jatupon gluttonously swallowed the pills down his gullet he kept wondering if it were cocaine. Suthep vanished and then there was the mosquito again. In a transformed madness, the mosquito became Kazem; and this brother kept riding him painfully while Jatupon wondered if Kumpee, the fetid one, had run off permanently with his “Chinawoman.”

Somewhere into the night—had it been in the bathroom when he was vomiting or when he was back under the net with a washcloth on his head?—he could not place where he was at; and then odd thoughts came into his mind. “If love oils are a way to make the anus and the vagina something that they aren’t designed for maybe I’m pregnant with my brother’s child? Does he love me? What is love? My bottom has spread out like a damp shirt when stretched”

Then it was the mosquito again. He asked what were Jatupon’s job aspirations in Bangkok. “Oh, I don’t know,” the boy responded. “I have thought many things.”

“Such as...” it asked.

“At times I have thought that I could become a monk—one of those real monks that live in the cave, eat only vegetables, and have no needs or wants.”

The mosquito scoffed. “What a bloody idealist. Deny your hungers and you deny the animal that comprises so much of the human being-the animal that developed a high degree of consciousness to fight his way up as the dominant species, the animal that nonetheless behaves according to instinct. If you deny the human you will have wasted your life not living it at all. That is what will happen if you are lucky. If unlucky, I suppose you will eventually snap like a crazed immigration officer who begins to shoot tourists. You are an animal not that you have to be swallowed up whole into your hungers. The illusions of being in love, the ambitions that have allowed you to subdue the Earth under the illusion of gaining some happy plateau after making your conquests, are hardly instincts one can extract. One shouldn’t extract them. These instincts have filled your kind with purpose thereby making brief existences on a meaningless planet bearable. Most importantly sexual desire keeps your race proliferating. Tell me something a bit more practical.”

“Well...sometimes I have thought I could become a money collector in a city bus. I would be a Bangkok Metropolitan Transportation employee—BMT.”

“Well, being prime minister would never suit you. I must say that this is certainly less extreme and easily in your reach. What attracts you to the profession of ticket tearing?”

Jatupon imagined the money collector clicking the lid of his metallic cylinder while shoving through the people. At times he would sit on the monkey bar near the open door feeling the artificial winds created by this fast moving green tube full of standing contortionists. When new customers came in he would put their money into the tube and extract tickets, weightless as stamps, from the same container. He would click and click to get their attention. When the bus was inordinately full, barefoot or in sandals, he would stand on the last step an inch from death like a parachutist without a parachute.

“I just think that I could do it,” he told the mosquito.

“Yes,” said the mosquito, “but could you count change to the satisfaction of the mass transit department of Bangkok?”

“I’m not hardly a dummy,” Jatupon said angrily.

“Let’s not go into that,” the mosquito said. “I know you can count. I’m just not sure if it goes beyond ten. That’s all. What other fun things could you become if needed-any type of job that can at least grant you eighty dollars worth of free falling baht each month?”

“I don’t know. I’m tired of thinking about it. It is such an anguish to worry about surviving continually.”

“Indeed. Just like you were thinking before: animals that have insight into the fact that they are nothing but ambulatory meat; only you are the meat of the richer classes. Your life will be consumed at work for their pleasure.”

The girl friend handed her sun burnt Siamese a key to the room and excoriated him for not believing her about the distance of the apartment building from the department store. She snubbed encountering extensive numbers of the underclass even though her father owned the building. She stood aloof and contracted the muscles of her face even before the evaporation of urinary molecules from the fa�ade of the building attacked her nostrils. She disheveled Jatupon’s hair and then maternally combed it back again with her fingers. She told Kumpee that she would take a taxi back to the department store and wait for him at McDonald’s. Then she left them in repugnance.

Within a glance each of them saw all there was of their apartment burrowed under the building and became sullen. Kumpee lied that he would leave his bag in the apartment and then see his girlfriend back to her home. Jatupon lay on the floor. Suthep unpacked and put the headphones of a Walkman around his ears. Kazem took a shower. The subject of his departure was forgotten. Kumpee sat on his case for a half hour eating his durian. Then when there seemed an inconspicuous exit he picked up his bag and went away. They felt his missing presence prod the vacuous air an hour later when they noticed that the suitcase was gone.

Chapter 4

It was 2 a.m. and the mosquito came into the scenes of his REM with wings piercing through and dominating over every brief episodic nightmare. It was wearing an orange monk’s robe and superciliously imposed its own presence on all scenes that Jatupon alone was supposed to rehearse. It altered a script that Jatupon’s brain had conjured in the hope of figuring out how to interact with his environment and live with himself harmoniously. Initially his sleep consisted of nascent dream-roles to find out if feigning a serious illness would have altered his parents’ journey of early demise. Later there were others such as trying to persuade the fetid one’s Chinese girlfriend to buy him a white shirt and necktie so that he could apply at the Bangkok Metropolitan Transportation Department and thereby resurrect himself as an economic deliverer and a masculine force to be admired instead of dog excrement on his brothers’ heels that he perceived them as perceiving him to be. There were also briefer skits in the random feelings, thoughts, and perceptions he was trying to categorize. One was of trying to successfully bite his shirt to stop himself from crying out when Kazem’s riveting night sports were too painful and another one was of attempting to remember the few neighborhoods and streets of Bangkok that he had learnt in past visits and perhaps link them to various names that only sleep could recall. Throughout it all was the buzz of the mosquito. This insect-monk buzzed no differently than a bee.

“And where were you today and yesterday?” it asked.

“I didn’t get out the glue and there were no pills to pop.”

“Why didn’t you get out the glue?”

“I want to do this for fun. I want these trips to stay what they call “recreational.” I’ll take them only when I need out. I don’t want to be an addict.”

“You aren’t an addict. If your body really wanted it, you wouldn’t have been able to resist it for over 24 hours. Still, even though this is noble and good, you don’t want to walk away from your friends.”

“I know.”

“What did you do this afternoon?”

“I went to fly a kite near Wat Phra Kaeo.”

“Do you mean you masturbated in the temple housing the Emerald Buddha? I mean that’s fine if it is true. Surely another person or two over the past two or three centuries has done that also. All the same, please refrain from using Thai slang. You don’t want to sound like a dummy when you talk to me.”

“No, I mean it literally, Ajarn,” said Jatupon. Ajarn meant “respected teacher.” “I went to the area outside of the Grand Palace in Sanam Luang. In front of the golden and pointed domes of the entrance there is an oval football field of dirt. The radio mentioned that hundreds of boys and girls were flying kites there. I was planning to buy a kite and fly mine with the hundreds that were soaring next to each other but there was no one my age doing that.”

“Neither a boy nor a man: what an awkward state to be in. Anyhow, so you wanted to fly a kite near the golden pagodas and cupolas of the Grand Palace and Wat Phra Kaeo but you didn’t do so. I assume it was more for lack of money. Is that right? Is that all? I can’t imagine why you would think that you could use money for such extravagances considering your present predicament.”

“I had some. I always get some.”

“How?”

“I go through Kazem’s pockets when he is asleep.”

“Do you mean you steal it?”

“Not really. He knows I do it. It is kind of like a little game...sort of.”

“Oh, I can pick it from your simple mind so easily. The rule being that after you provide your sexual services to him he allows you to pickpocket from the pants that he drapes on a chair. If he awakens he beats you or disparages your existence in front of the family but if you are quiet you can take most of what he has in his pockets and run away throughout the day.”

“When I’m not working. That is kind of how it has gone. He has always been kind enough to see that I get a vacation every week. He was always telling Mother that I needed to be something other than an illiterate slob and the least they could do was allow me to go to the library once a week. I would usually go there...sometimes a movie or standing at a newsstand reading the comics. That is sort of how it was. Now we aren’t working so I didn’t take very much yesterday. Hey, if you can read my simple little mind so easily, why do you bother to ask things?”

“To amuse myself a little. Did this pickpocket game occur when your parents were alive?”

“Yes, it began when I was eleven. What could I have said to anyone? I was hated. You said so yourself. I wasn’t going to make it worse by humiliating myself that way. They wouldn’t have believed me; and they wouldn’t have wanted to think about something so disgusting. Anyhow, Kazem always had me swear that I’d keep it secret and he is the only one who has really cared about me-as much as people care about others. Maybe not so much.” He became taciturn.

“Quiet!” said the mosquito belatedly. “I hear something.” It paused and looked through the small window of the basement apartment. “Oh, it is your mother driving up now.”

“She doesn’t drive. She doesn’t own a car.”

“She does now.” Jatupon remembered that she always did buy lottery tickets that mendicants sold from wooden attach� cases hung around their chests. “I thought she didn’t have the chance of a snowball in hell of winning” commented the mosquito. “Anyhow, here she is and it is grocery day. You need to help her bring in the bags.”

It was raining but he nonetheless heard the car. He sauntered out of the kitchen of the river cabin as the screen door sprang back behind him.

“Mother,” he yelled in a surprised tone. “You’re back.” The engine stopped.

“Of course I’m here. You knew I’d be back in an hour. Where else would I be?” Her voice screamed out belligerently but it was hollow and virtually inaudible in the container of the car. The Mercedes Benz was flaxen and waxed and the woman inside was a bit of the same self in an idealized way. She was even more young, beautiful and poised than Kumpee’s girlfriend. Her skin was also whiter than the fetid one’s infatuation and instead of being dark, thick, and puffy like a durable and well tread tire she was a thin sheath, almost like a transparent condom, and perfectly unblemished.

“Did you go to Ayutthaya?”

“Have you really forgotten where I’ve been. Even you can’t be that stupid. I told you before I left. I went to Thee Nhai.” Thee nai was the word “Where” in Thai; but she spoke it with such certainty that he believed in its legitimacy as a city name like Chaing Mai. She spoke even more loudly from her encasement inside the car but was still barely audible.

“To see Grandmother?”

“And grocery shopping. After all, it is grocery day. “ She stopped frowning and slowly made a partial smile. “I have something for you.” He felt surprised. He wondered why he would be given something. He couldn’t remember having ever been given a gift. In Thailand (the real Thailand as lived by the poor masses) children were instruments: tools to ease the task of making a living, and later they were sustenance and emotional pampering for the aging parents. Above the steering wheel she showed to him a small rectangular box that she opened like a coffin. In it was a large golden pen that gleamed like the roofs of a Buddhist temple. Minutes passed. She continued to exhibit the pen and her half-smile while staying encased. All of the car windows were rolled up. He kept wondering what good the pen would do him if it were just a visual appearance seen through the glass of a car. He forgot the pen and concentrated on his mother who was as intangible. He heard the sound of her calmly wrestling unsuccessfully with a door handle that would not unlock.

He or it—this mordant mosquito—came with wings piercing through sleep. He again spoke of her, the girlfriend, as “Chinatown skin” and drawing her from a deck of cards, the mosquito threw her. The card, animated like an email greeting, clicked around as if on high heels. The woman’s form, detaching itself from the shell of the card, sang and danced her dance. Jatupon and the mosquito both lusted for her. Jatupon wanted to rush into the toilet the way he had seen a man in his early twenties rush into the public restroom at the movie theatre, Major Ciniplex in Ayuttaya, a week before his parents died. On that occasion, or misadventure, Jatupon, who a minute later went to relieve himself in an adjacent cubicle before going back to his cart of noodles, heard pumping noises. Then on his side of the crack he faintly saw a shadow of a hand stroking a penis on the tiles to the left of his feet. That man had sought pleasure in marginal solitude; but for him, with a mosquito staring him down with emotionless black eyes, there was no privacy. His masturbatory time was limited by his hallucinations.

He tried to suffocate the thought of the Chinese Thai woman in an imaginary pillowcase. He tried to extinguish the sparks of his own desires by deluging them with more abstract and tenuous thoughts. He wondered what would be some other choices of jobs he could pursue to break away from what was left of this fraternity and become an independent being. The idea hurt him. He then told himself that he never wanted to leave his brothers. He told himself that he would go out to find Kumpee, the fetid one, if he only knew where in the big city to search.

Jatupon saw his own pimpled face staring at him; his childhood friends who moved or became people he could not relate to; and his parents that no human sense of bonding, volition, or imagination could bring back. Orphic memories gleamed and sparkled opaquely like the moving shadows of leaves on the pavement. “So, I can not see my own reflection without cringing. So, I felt that sense of fear that came from thinking that my classmates might not want me to play takraw with them and that feeling has not left me entirely. So, I’m scared of losing people, like fumbling with the bamboo ball, as if their departure would be the end of my own personal essence! So, in the end, we all come down in a cruel fate.” He could not formulate these abstract thoughts. It all was a base and indistinct feeling. He was attempting to channel the fears that constituted so much of his being so that they would not burst into his consciousness.

“So, have you finished falling so fully and foolishly into yourself,” asked the mosquito. It paused and looked back at the girl. “She is Chinatown skin, the kind every man pants for: all beautifully white, each aesthetic non-deformity ranking her in the realm of desirability in every Thai man’s mind. ‘Won’t she, in this quintessence of beauty, have virtually no chance of making a deformed baby,’ screams the man’s ingrained DNA programming that composes each and every cell. ‘Won’t she, in this quintessence of beauty, have virtually no chance of making a deformed baby,’ scream’s the psychological programming created by the influence of his peers who think that her money and education have made her as valuable as white ivory -the type often used in Buddhist statuettes. Hormonal discriminatory passions ensue, dopamine hits the pleasure receptors of the brain, and make him an addict for a hormonal pleasure with her.”

“Is this love? Is this all that we are? Love is the best part of us and yet it is as this? I can’t believe that,” retorted Jatupon.

The mosquito, the big “it,” guffawed. “You are truly ingenuous. You are contrary to the natural world around you-a true babe focusing your trusting round eyes so eagerly on the savage world around you. Personally it is a novelty to me and I don’t mind it at all. Do you remember how you felt when you were young?”

He remembered the warmth he felt toward his mother even though she did not like him. He remembered how she cared for him despite thinking him a burden. She was the good birdie feeding his mouth. Had he not believed all love to be something like a mother’s love and that this mother’s love was pure? Had he as little as a few days earlier been inveigled in the optimism of being free from the consideration of how instinct is passed down in genetic transfer from generation to generation? Had he not imagined a desire for a woman and being “in love” as something more spectacular than bottle rockets and Roman candles lit from the bridges over the Chao Phraya River in the Loi krathong celebration?

There were times he had even considered love to be a preordained gift bestowed onto each being in subtle and illuminating graces. It was a bit like a lit candle on a krathong, a hand length banana-leaf boat sent out onto waters during the Loi krathong holiday. A given krathong would perhaps sail a hundred meters on a river before being tipped over in waves and winds along with one’s negativity and culpability; and for this exorcism the river goddess would bestow onto such an individual a new year of blessings. As a boy he had thought that this universal love was so pure that it was colorless and translucent. He believed that it was so ubiquitous and protecting like a mosquito net around the world, but alive, sensitive, and full of feeling; and that from it came the babies...the babies. Certainly as the years were placed on the tables like plates of rice and bowls of noodle soup it was harder to believe that brotherly love was equally dispersed among mankind. It seemed that the darker the pigment of a Thai, the more likely he was to do his menial tasks and the whiter he was, the more such Thais seemed to own the enterprises of the country. To his brother, Kumpee, like the father, he had existed as a verbal punching bag to relieve stress. “Night sports” was the term that Kazem called his form of brotherly love.

“Now...” scoffed the mosquito as it smiled maliciously, “Now, you know the truth. The truth shall set you free. Babies come from the desire to both eat healthy human flesh and crawl and slither around in its beautiful skin.”

He woke up startled to a void and a room that was at first unfamiliar in the darkness until memory seeped in and he knew where he was at. As he was feeling depressed looking at this basement room where they were caged and smelling the stagnancy of air stinking of mens’ bodies more eclectically than just their armpits, he fought with the rectangular window to which leaned weeds and grass. He barely budged it open. The patch of greenery flushed its grassy smells as well as the urinary ones with a gust of wind. Even decay was in the grass and such smells were beautiful. He watched the blades moving. They whispered of impermanence. They reminded him that as dictators die, civilizations ultimately become nothing but a few buried artifacts and bones, and palaces crumble, he would not stay in this cell forever. Everything would change; and change at times had its advantage.

And yet the child in him resisted change. It yearned to declare every dust particle that had been trodden on its friend. It did not like parting and it, in him, hated the idea of Kumpee gone. He felt jealous that this woman had taken him. He hated her despite her earlier friendliness to him. He hated her white skin and hated Kumpee for his ugly dark skin, his abandonment, and his fetid ways. Mostly he hated his contemptuously tinged use of the nickname, “Jatuporn,” showing that he knew everything about this relationship with Kazem. The apathy in the pronouncement would have been bearable. The contempt would have at least shown concern. But that particular mix spelled out that he, Jatupon, was really the fetid one and he hated the fetid one for it.

Stagnant and morose in feelings and thoughts, he dripped in the sauna of his own sweat; and, careful not to stumble over his brothers in the night, he opened the door for more breezes, for a passing mosquito, for voices, and the dispersing of crowded thoughts. He recalled untainted and simple memories of Kazem telling Suthep a joke a customer had relayed to him making all four of them laugh until they turned red; the shapes and slight variations of the colors of clouds; and lying on his bed in their parents home hearing the sounds of locusts somewhere in the swaying tree limbs cradled in the wind’s caresses. He knew that such trivial and yet poetical experiences were what constituted human happiness.

He stepped outside and then walked a couple of blocks in a still relatively unfamiliar terrain. To him, the surveyor of the night, the city spilled out in the oozing newness of black and yellow tubes of paint. There was a larger road and across the street was a Seven-Eleven convenience store. He stood there and his eyes followed the traffic that went directly in front of it. He rummaged through one of his bags until he found his glue. He inhaled its fumes and popped some amphetamines he had purchased at the drugstore with Kazem’s pocket money.

He remembered that Suthep and Kazem, like curious beasts, had occasionally looked in on him during that time, a year ago, when his body had its opiate force (really a mixed drug combination adversely affected by beer he drank during the Songkran New Year’s water fight) poured from it like water from a colander. How sick he had been. From Kazem’s suggestion, it had been a monk—a former teacher of his boyhood—whom he had stayed with while he was stiff and shaking. The periodic vomiting and shaking had seemed so incessant although it, like all, was fleeting. It had been too intolerable for his parents and yet for all the talk of the father getting rid of him completely by shoving him into a monastery, they had been happy to again gain their worker.

Lost in the myriad dimly lit trails of his own thoughts, he at last returned and went back to his bed of clothes. He smoothed them out. He made them even. He thought that he might be reprimanded about leaving the door open for insects to fly in. It was to his satisfaction but it probably wouldn’t be to theirs and these brothers might easily awaken from the dogs that could be heard a block away. He got up and shut both the door and the window. Then, for a few minutes, he listened to the howling of dogs muffled through the closed door. For a half hour his positions changed restlessly on the wad of clothes. He thought of the postcard pictures of temples and palaces; of possibly being a money collector on the city busses, standing on a step and hanging out of the continually opened door of a green bus; of—

“What a pathetic existence. You haven’t even paid any rent on this room. Gifts can be taken back, you know. You could be thrown out at any whim: Kazem’s, the girlfriend’s, her father who might hate him enough to kick you out. You have no money or jobs. What will you do?”

“I thought that you weren’t coming here.”

“Here?”

“To Bangkok.”

“Did I say that?” it asked for the first time in a tone that was introspective and self-conscious.

“You said it. If you make yourself out to be this monster of truths I can’t see how you can lie like this.”

“I was with you earlier in a less bright, more murky form of a dream when you were anxious that you hadn’t gotten any privacy to fly your kite. You didn’t seem to remember quoting me then.”

It did not like the merit of its own veracity scrutinized. It turned away and paused. It scratched one leg against another thoughtfully the way one might a scalp. Jatupon wondered for a moment if the insect would disappear wordlessly from the weight of it’s own waning confidence but there was no chance of that. It reasserted itself, attempting to discard its solemn self-interrogations for a more august posture and attitude.

“You would be the aimless kinetic movements of other dust just like your kind if it wasn’t for me giving you consciousness and a soul. You impudent little dummy, you should not speak to your ajarn this way. Your blood only has worth as the nutrients of my posterity. That is its purpose. If you become so calculating and crafty with me I’ll reevaluate our relationship.” One of its arms reached over and caressed his skin. “At a distance,” it said, “the brownness makes it look as solid as a rock. I forget that it is so tender. Your naivete also seems so obdurate that I often forget the self-serving and disingenuous muck underneath it all.” It brought back its arm, opened its mouth widely, and spat at the boy. “Here have an early Songkran,” it said. Songkran was the New Year’s water festival in the hottest month of April. The month was really March of the year 2445 according to the Thai Buddhist calendar. “I come and go by the dictates of my own intelligent, restless brooding. I move from one rock to another hoping to get satisfaction or at least a reprieve from dissatisfaction. I, an intelligent being, must delude myself that the composite of rocks that make up this planet are something other than hardened shells of dirt and that I, wandering from one rock to another, am really living experiences instead of hallucinating pleasurable sensations for my self to stay sane. Only seeing other life forms scrambling around the rocks to be my appetizers engender me with purpose. It paused. “There is nothing too peculiar in me wandering around in contradictory paths. All intelligent creatures are the same. Boredom drives them to reshape their environment to serve their petty and selfish goals. This might be entertaining for higher creatures but it’s an absolute curse for the highest.” It wiggled its face and then pointed with an arm. “I must relieve your mind of worry. As they say, ignorance is bliss. You have little risk of finding boredom so insanely strong even if you stay bound to noodles all your life. Boredom makes me curious. I want to know many things. I want to know about you boys.”

“You are a bit like our guardian, aren’t you..”

“Yes, if that is what you need—a surrogate uncle: that is what I’ll be.”

His vision, his mosquito-uncle and deus ex machina, smashed like a fly against a car window. Jatupon was exhausted and his mental alertness relaxed in preparation for sleep. In a REM more troubled, incoherent, and weltering, there were flies seemingly caught between a window and a screen. The screen was opened a crack and yet the crack only demarcated freedom and the self-imprisonment of the mind for they climbed around the screen and yet never found that opening that had allowed them to enter. Then there were rocks with a bit of honey and flies swarming in it; and himself echoing the mosquito’s question on how the three of them would be making a living. He disparaged himself by casting that self as a cartoon of a motorcycle taxi driver sitting sidesaddle with a group waiting patiently in a queue for customers to arrive. Stationary with time passing amuck, and content with empty and drowsy space and flies buzzing about his face, his life defied money and motion. “Get out of the way. If you can’t fasten a doorknob take a broom and sweep up that mess in the back of the restaurant. I don’t know what you are going to do when you get older. You can’t even cook. You can’t do anything and even walking you trip over your own shadow,” said his father. “You should see his cartoons,” said Kazem. “The boy can draw.” The cartoon of himself had signed the wedding papers and he and his cartoon wife were standing near a monk as relatives came by with bowls of water rinsing their hands. Flies buzzed around their faces. A worker, selling Buddhist statuettes, necklaces, and rosaries, picked her child up, pulled down his pants, and let him urinate in the parking lot.

“Love,” said the cartoon of the mosquito, “makes up the vernacular of pop culture. It is innate as a quest. It lances life’s old festers granting a mood of the new. For the male it is a consistent alternative on nights when the hunt for new females becomes unsuccessful. Both sexes need to believe that their own physical attributes will be passed on to posterity. For sociable creatures the illusion of having a permanent foundation for their lives in marriage and family is indispensable. So much goes into this ineluctable lure called love and marriage: most of all a void so enormous that we chip through other skulls to record the memory of ourselves in that watery mass called a brain. On overpasses and sidewalks you’ve noticed those weak starving dogs with patches of fur missing from their bodies. They too sniff around other dogs in the hope of confirming and making some permanent documentation of themselves on those brains. Even if they don’t have energy for sex they still document themselves. Men are programmed to deliver the raw material of themselves in any dark alley. A woman’s love, once devoted to he who has pierced into her-he who has engendered in her that overpowering feeling of one inside her—now devotes herself to motherhood and seeing that the child is...

His ideas were erratic. They hopped and skipped over each other and he held tightly onto parts of the clothing he lay on. Then with photographic images, he dreamed of trees, waterfalls, and Thai islands he had never seen before and his hands relaxed their grip on the clothes. There was a panoramic view of Thailand-rural, Khmer and Burmese individuals smiling in the northern regions and stolid Moslem and Indians in the south. The rural views in sunrise and sunset were more real than reality and then the aerial focus went down and down and veered back up to the center. It was Bangkok again and there was Lumpini Park.

An unknown girl was sitting on a mat in the gravel in a far corner of the entrance to the park. Immediately behind her was the gate and in front of her was a large statue of King Rama V. A car entered the circular drive that went around the statue. She got up to guide its driver where to park. She hoped that by helping to ensure that he didn’t crash into parked cars that he would pay her a few baht as others had. She did not beg. She did not prostitute herself. She only did that.

“I could do something like that. It’s honest,” thought Jatupon. She continued to use hand gestures as the driver backed up according to her directions. “This is a good girl. I want someone like that to become my wife,” he thought. No sooner had this idea come to him than the car sped up and ran over her. Then it stopped and the driver hurried out. The driver held her in his hands and Jatupon felt her pulse. There was none and he dropped the arm. He walked through the gate to a woman sitting within the park on a sheet on top of a grassy knoll. He sat on the sheet in front of her and before the spread of fortune telling cards.

“I don’t see much future in it” she said. “Being in love with an elder brother. There is no future in it from what I see.”

“Those are just cards. How would you know?” he whined

“Yes, those are just cards but you don’t even need to look into the cards to see something like that.”

“How should I live? He’s had sex in me. I should kill myself. A boy fucked in the ass can not be a man.”

“No, probably not; but you must continue to be the best of what you are. Man, yes, some-a few—might say. Some would say something less than that. Whatever you are, maimed or full, you have to continue to continue. We all should go through the whole show until the winds carry away our ashes and the soul returns for more learning, more suffering.”

Chapter 5

Bound for his uncle’s home in the far north of the city, Kazem was forced to reposition himself in the back of the bus next to a bucket of swishing water and rags. He swatted the mosquito that was hovering over its sodden progeny. He beat it towards the baldheads of a couple of monks in front of him who had usurped his seat impudently. From his new and more uncomfortable seat, which often lost its cushion as he sat there, he looked out of the window and tried to beat back the inferno of hate for Kumpee that flared in the nerves throughout his body. He stared down at what appeared as the moving edge of the road from which businesses and pedestrians, from the corner of his left eye, ricocheted. He fingered a slit of the vinyl blue upholstery of his cushion in a vaginal preoccupation passed onto males through the inheritance of this cellular knowledge called sexual instinct. Low levels of guilt oozed from him more subtly than foaming breakers of beer in a mug and yet he didn’t feel that he had done anything wrong.

This moment was no different than other times of malaise in the past. He wasn’t specifically troubled about the fruition of his wanton fantasies to meet his uncle in the hope of using him for some money. Money should never rest. It should be spent or invested. If it were invested it would be used to make more wealth or for philanthropy that ameliorated thievery. He agreed in a vague way with Kumpee who vaguely inveighed something to the effect that a bit of money from a more affluent pocket into a poorer one helped the economy and was a just act. Likewise, he was not bothered by the release he had gained earlier in a bit of sex with his youngest sibling. This activity was to him just an extension of a back rub in a good massage compounded in a bit of sportive wrestling. It was a due owed to him for undergoing the stress of looking after the younger brothers and keeping the principle of family alive. He was acting his part of the big brother no different than he always had since Kumpee was continually negligent in performing the role. There were no specifics to this malaise he felt. The malaise was brought on by the wistful craving to go beyond the confines of his containment and yet reality, petty and limited, told him to use what was there under his feet, in his sight, and what he could touch. A man in the confines of his life used what was under him.

What being did not use the Earth?

He continued to finger the slit of the vinyl blue upholstery in a vaginal preoccupation. He wanted to feel beyond the hole of malaise that was as empty as the hollow whistling of a wind through a cracked door or that numb sensation of lying alone, the fantasy of his masturbation eluding him, and his semen flowing on his skin in a last vestige of a river. Using others was as unconscious as a reflex but the malaise came into the equation when he saw what he had to use. Why didn’t he have money to wine and dine a female in the mating protocol like any male black-tipped hang fly? Why did he have to cajole, beg, or charm an avuncular affection from this remote individual who wasn’t related to them by blood?

He began to stare at the driver and a boy who sat near the front window in a padded hump that went over the gearshift. It was just like seeing a self in miniature that had gotten lost and ensnared in the thickets of time: father driving the bus and this boy seated on a padded metal covering that went over the transmission. At times the boy touched the clutch hoping to one day guide the mammoth beast like his father (the boy believing that his father was the perfection of all things possible). A plastic red container of ice and water was on this pedestal where the boy sat and from it a straw stuck out of the lid and he drank and ate fish chips that were in a plastic sack. He just ate and drank as the bus circled around its route of the city. How drab it all was but for a boy and yet believing his father to be the perfection of all things, such self-restraint was possible. Their father had had such a job when Kumpee was a young boy. For a year or two of such journeys, sitting there with the highest admiration for a father, he was filled with the highest love that was initiating him into the positive dimensions of manhood and responsibility. When his father lost his job and worked on the street alongside of their mother, he launched his tirades against the younger brothers who were “suck-calves” on his wife. He hated their neediness and as the spankings continued, Kumpee began to oppose these gestures. Such self-abnegation caused him to become the full brunt of the beatings.

Having been given time alone, Jatupon scraped up his stolen collection of loose change and ran off hand in hand with his freedom. Having no responsibilities for the first time in his life apart from the night sports that usually happened in the mornings, his life was becoming a purposeless abyss. He personified his freedom and together they broke beyond small basement windows and imagined portals to real places. Together, they went to see the life that fulminated within the streets of the city of Bangkok. Kazem was gone so they did not have to be there to hear his expletives about the older brother’s thievery and the younger brother’s disappearances. The disappearances were ones Kazem attributed to Suthep chumming up with Kumpee to have a bit of money to play snookers. For hours and hours they were lost in the movements of traffic, the brown and Chinese faces, movements of strangers on the sidewalks, and the swirl of infinite numbers on the quest for money, happiness, and adventure. He read faces and movements from his spreading feelers. They too wanted money bestowed onto them to squander at will in all forms of self-indulgence. They too wanted to squelch their routines to live their dishonorable lives in the quest of sensuality. To have resources and freedom to run around loose as a goose in a department store was something they all yearned for and seeing these pedestrian shoppers of the sidewalk, with more money than he, made the boy hunger for better things.

Freedom was becoming old as he continued to walk with her into the crowds but she rejuvenated lasciviously when his eye spotted someone not in the shopper’s swirl. The cravings so attractive to Jatupon were missing in those deadened eyes and passing from him he fell into the others. Membership was free. It was lack of hope that was given so generously to the majority of the world’s populace that was indispensable to them. Lurid as family, fetid as Kumpee’s shoes, here they were and here he was with them; and yet they were his own or what he assumed was his own—the little that he knew of himself.

It was a family of addicts, addicted to family or even a concoction of family, cobbled together within the affinity of pain and the tangles of neurons like brambles pricking their consciousness with old travail at every turn: memories that they couldn’t free themselves from. Within this desert of cacti and brambles they poured destructive chemicals and suicidal inclinations to kill and enlarge their brambly world. They were landscape artists of their personal deserts: hating, destroying, and replanting their cacti and brambles with each new whim. Here he was with a new family—a mosaic of complete strangers who were not related to him nor were they relating to him or much to each other. Still, it was a surrogate family nonetheless succumbing to an infinite current of darkness to which they all had understanding. In many ways they were wiser: they knew that the insatiability of desire that made one propelled to breed, work, and buy was not going to stop. They knew that no one in such circles was going to find contentment. They were all going to fail miserably. They knew that there was a deep discontent in the human psyche that yearned for destruction and death. In the course of being degraded by significant others they had somehow gotten excluded from the participation of such narcissistic, consumeristic appetites and that the salvation of compassion would not be forthcoming. This benign pastel family sat together on the slab of cement under the overpass while over them, on the overpass itself, were the trinkets sold by salesmen, homeless elderly women, mothers, those who stunk from being unable to bathe off their rotting surface of scaling skin, and deformed slabs of flesh spread out on parts of the overpass with fidgeting partial limbs. They all had nearly empty cups of one baht coins and the most unfortunate of them could testify of dark currents deeper than regular people could imagine for one moment. They, his surrogate family, knew that there was not just one blackness but despair had myriad blacker and bleaker hues.

Under the steps of the overpass sniffing his glue while these transients already riddled in amphetamines and alcohol (at times borrowing his glue) smoked cigarettes incessantly, his mind swept away from him like a butterfly fluttering by. When he first met them in this spot their first words were to offer to him cigarettes but he told them that if he were to put one in his mouth it would remind him of the fetid one with his fetid shoes and socks littered everywhere, the one who had stolen his parents property upon their deaths and had abandoned them to starvation in the great city of Bangkok. These transients had the understanding and listening skills of trained psychologists and offered unto him a piece of bubble gum instead which he gratefully accepted.

Still, a thought preoccupied him off and on. He wondered why they were all seated there in such a confined space; but within a few hours the storm clouds moved overhead and the rain deluged the streets making him forget about one man complaining of his jock itch and scratching himself, another that cried and looked up into the clouds, and a third that kept wanting to barter off his torn sandals for Jatupon’s sneakers and kept calling him “uncle” even though he was ten or fifteen years the older brother. Across the road he occasionally saw umbrellas sail out to the gray of the clouds. One of the other five transients was repulsed by a spider that crept onto him in its effort to escape the rain, cursed at a rock in his shoe that would not leave the obscure crevice of the sole, and then in one of his shifting moods made a declaration of happiness that they had found such an inconspicuous spot where the police rarely harassed them. The woman transient gave herself to her man so completely that when he was angry, happy, or sad, she was more this way—so little did she understand her own mind, having become nothing but an extension of his pleasure and pain.

Sometimes silent and tacit, these transients who were continually judged by others, judged the sincerity of his callow rebellion with their stares. A few times they went beyond that to a more pronounced judgment. “Don’t you have a mamma to go to? Your mamma’s calling for you to come to lunch,” said the one with the woman. That time the shoe barterer laughed so hard it churned up mucus into his mouth, which he spit into a crack in the sidewalk that already had its share of gum and cigarette buds. “Mamma’s calling,” said the woman. “Lunch is ready, honey. Mamma’s calling,” she repeated or at least he thought she repeated. Maybe none of them had said anything. He wasn’t quite sure.

Jatupon turned away from them and slipped off his tennis shoes, smelling their soles to make sure that they weren’t overly fetid. He looked at one of his bare feet composed of roadways of veins and early wrinkles of epidermis. He thought to himself that an unrecognized universe had existed right there in his shoes. He sniffed his armpits. They were fetid as glue but he liked the transmission of the sweat molecules up his nostrils.

He deeply inhaled the glue and then held his breath allowing the fumes to permeate within. He repeated the process four or five times and for the most part he, they, and all went away in a haze. It was like being blindfolded but instead of darkness there was a soft patch of white haze. At first it startled him and he wondered if this ethereal gaseous mist was Saddam Hussein’s lethal spray upon the world and yet he felt giddy in this laughing gas. When his mind was able to register the fact that they were seated next to him, the haze made the man and his woman, the shoe barterer, the sky crier, and all (transient and non-transient, imagined and remembered) such special creatures. These transients were sordid and brainless but, especially in the intense inundation of fumes they were the most extraordinary of life forms. He was almost moved to kiss each of them on their foreheads. From this pillar of light the mosquito, dressed in Buddhist attire and carrying its mask, came with the force of God. Its feelers were like acid and when they touched Jatupon his clothes seemed to sizzle and burn away. He was naked with a smashed ant sandwiched between a fingernail and skin. He remembered that a minute earlier he had been trying to direct it away from his leg and in his clumsy misdirection at the appearance of the pillar of light there it was under the nail curled up in fetal agony.

As the mosquito slowly descended he could see tragedy more clearly than he ever did when not snorting the fumes, and yet it rolled off his mind weightlessly. He was giddy in brotherly love and yet naked, he wanted to copulate with the world. Even more, he wanted to reproduce his ideas with her. He sensed that all humans fell victim to this substance: they got giddy in love and reproduced, they gained meaning in their lives from this feeling, and then after nature got them to beget children, she plugged up the dopamine somewhat like the waning high he felt with his brother. He felt the insect monster inject him with the malaria of tragedy: random images were kicked about in his mind like starving dogs allowed to propagate on the streets incessantly from the non-interference of Buddhist principles. He saw all the suffering species from an aerial perspective for he was being carried around on the wings of the mordant mosquito that had scooped him up on its back. Buddha knew that tragedy abounded in recycled life but Jatupon could not figure out if Buddha tried to break the recycling of life like a coward who couldn’t endure pain or if he left his protective palace to understand the magnitude of human suffering for the masses. The story was full of contradictions. He thought, “Where are you taking me...straight...now spinning...now plunging...more G-force than I think I can stand.”

“Into yourself,” it shouted.

“That’s a cruel place to be,” Jatupon said.

“Yes, it is,” admitted the mordant entity. From their distance distinct forms were difficult to ascertain but he knew that he was far outside himself and to be outside of it into a world of motion and forms made him feel relieved. But from a couple of indecipherable forms in movement he halfway made out and half way imagined a half-naked baby crying on the outskirts of a park. It crawled alone at a distance from a cook. The cook halted her work to get him. He cried loudly at each initiative at trying to appease him. He didn’t like being held. He didn’t like the banana put in his hands. Finally, she placed him in the bucket of water that contained her dirty plates.

“So innocent and yet calculating,” said the mosquito. “It was wanting in that tub of water all along.”

“Oh, do you see them too.”

“No, not really. Anyhow, based on what you see, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Agree that he crawled away so as to cause his mother to put him in the water?” He laughed. “No, he is just a baby. I don’t think he is that developed. I don’t think he is that self serving.”

“Are these two forms you are now seeing outside of yourself too?” asked the mosquito.

“Of course,” he scoffed but he did not know.

Then he was descending or falling —falling in a diagonal descent on the mosquito’s back, falling onto its feelers, and falling from it entirely. There he was a brown boy in the pool on the roof of The Mall Ayuttaya with goggles on his face and wearing spandex swimming trunks. He looked so fashionable despite his poverty but the poor and discontent always found their stealth means to master petty thievery and a sullied self-image was easily forgotten. There were imitation mountains and waterfalls all around. He swam to the opposite side of the pool and said hello to a foreigner who sat on a rock letting the force of the fall hit his feet. The foreigner ignored him and again started swimming his laps. Then, feeling that he had been rude, he returned to the boy and asked him his name. The boy smiled and said an easy two-syllable name, Nawin. It seemed like an easy name for a foreigner to remember. After an uneventful attempt at conversations in two different languages to which neither party could understand the other one, the foreigner swam off. Still the boy was persistent, swimming over to the foreigner when he rested. This prompted the foreigner to go to the locker room to change sooner than what he would have done otherwise. The boy followed him. He accosted him while he was at the urinal and looked down onto him. He tried to come in when the foreigner was in his cubicle taking a shower. His motives for doing so were ambiguous ones: he wanted a foreigner friend even if this man was so much older than he was, he wanted to really learn the international language, and although he did not really have sexual feelings he would have done anything for a bit of money. As the man dressed on the bench Jatupon, the boy, put his hands together in a mendicant grasshopper pose with palms sandwiched together and held before his face in the “wei.” He opened his hands with the opening of the wallet.

A door of a shower booth opened. It was the mosquito drying himself with a towel.

“Nothing like a good swim followed by a warm shower. You got to meet an old friend today. That’s nice. Earlier you never mentioned this memory. I guess it wouldn’t have been a particularly flattering portrait to share with anyone. It borders on prostitution. Just when I was feeling sorry for you as the abused brother I learned of this. It adds a more complex intellectual dimension to your character, don’t you think? It makes you less moronic somehow.” Jatupon felt a metamorphosis and returned to his 14 year old body. Again he was riding on the mosquito’s back naked as a blue jay and his hair dripped water. He couldn’t confirm or negate the previous memory. It was vaguely familiar.

“Don’t you believe that was you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jatupon said indifferently.

“You don’t think so?”

“No it’s not, is it?” He began to choke on his saliva. He coughed. “Why?”

“Oh, dear. Are you okay?”

“Yes. Why?”

Why what?”

“Why is the self such a fearful place?”

“Why not?” said the mosquito. “Alone, shut up in one’s own hardened shell there is no logic—just passions running amuck.”

Tragedy and suicidal wishes clogged up his head. He did not like seeing bits of himself crawling around naked as a baby’s ass. He hated wondering if any of his brothers would come back to the apartment or fearing having to beg alone. He got up.

“Did you decide to finally go back to your mamma?” asked the man who had the woman resting her face in his lap. The woman picked a wild dandelion from the crack in the sidewalk and then reached her hand up to Jatupon’s shirt. She put it in his pocket. “Here is a flower for Mommy. You can give it to her when she fixes you supper.”

“My mother’s dead” yelled Jatupon with vehement hate and repugnance as he wadded up the flower in a fist and threw it onto the sidewalk. Then he walked away.

A tuc tuc driver, slowing down in passing, beeped the horn at him. The taxi looked like the distorted shape of a fly. He wished that he had just a chunk of the money Kumpee had plundered. With it, he told himself, he would buy his own motorcycle and become a self- employed taxi driver for his age surely restricted him from getting a job with the Bangkok Metropolitan Authorities. This, he told himself, would be far better than sitting on the monkey bars near the door of a bus clanging the tube of money upon one’s knee. Besides, he didn’t especially want to be one of the many nameless beggars applying for jobs with the Metropolitan Transportation Authorities.

He veered somehow from the sidewalk into a labyrinth of outdoor hallways that ran between stands and quasi-stores, under canvas canopies and through the smell of incense that came from a table that contained a 2-foot Buddhist statue. Upon finding his way out by charging through crowds and hangers of clothes, he heard the blaring of pi phat music, saw a vegetable market, and smelled redolent papayas, durians, watermelons, pineapples, guavas, and tangerines. Further along he smelled tom yam soup, grilled squid, goo-ey tia nam (rice noodle soup), khow laad nhaa gai (rice with chicken and bamboo), and other dishes in an outdoor restaurant. He passed silk stores, jewelry stores that catered toward ruby and sapphire-loving foreigners, and fast food restaurants. Then he went into Robinson Department Store.

In the restroom he relieved himself at a urinal that was furthest from the cleaning lady since her mopping presence there made him nervous and had the possibility of clogging him up. Then he sat down in the food court. His head was in vertigo like small children turning themselves around in the grass or the routine of one’s petty kinetic life. He often noticed affluent men walking around with girlfriends or wives in that male gesture of the hand of one arm clasping the other arm behind the back. The gesture conveyed that they were beyond the third world now. They had money, Bangkok had everything, and they would shop as befitting their status. He wanted to be them. He wanted out of his own skin to be a different person entirely but there was no exit for him in fast motion. The only consolation was in always evolving beyond that one seed, that one dividing cell that had started his life. There was still hope.

He saw a father and two girls with their many bags. He wanted a father like that instead of the one who had made him afraid to stand up, sit down, comb his hair, put on his pants, talk, or be silent without being excoriated. Only arduous work had offered him a respite from that man’s criticism. Only work had offered him that escape from being the cockroach running from his heels. Family wasn’t so ideal. At least his wasn’t. He was always cravenly scurrying away from one or more of them and vibrations they made. His mind spun around more wildly. He kept wishing that it would stay stolid and poised as statues of the Garuda and Kinnara, mythological creatures that permeated Thai art, literature, and dance.

He tried to focus in on beautiful ideas of family. He tried to breathe them in like the smell of drying clothes in the breeze or the smells of life replicating itself eternally in the verdant greenery on the outskirts of the city. All he could do was summon memories of Kumpee and their parents incessantly driven toward chasing any scheme that would put a few extra coins in their hands; Kazem’s secondhand treatment of his destitute brown Burmese woman a couple years earlier; Suthep whom he shared certain childish sympathies; and Kazem who was his protector. His head hurt and span: in school, out of school, struggling for subsistence as a group, the heads of the group dying, the move to Bangkok, and a thousand phantom faces that plagued his mind, exacerbating the throbbing. He tried to think of monks in their saffron robes with strapped metallic bowls dangling from their shoulders in which shopkeepers requiring blessings placed rice; the sweet taste of rambutans when the spiky core was broken and the transparent succulent egg was overtaken; and motorcycle taxi drivers with cardboard and pop bottle games that, with the tap of the nails of their fingers, kept their time of waiting from overwhelming them in boredom. A persistent fly over the table made him nervous and he thought that perhaps to counter the truths his subconscious spewed out in the form of the insect and his own need for stability (not just his environment changing but he, himself, was continually changing) he needed to invent a god for himself if nothing other than the God of Dirty Underwear. The persistent fly continued to besiege him so he left the department store and returned to his friends.

The “friends”—he did not know their names—seemed content with their circumstances. They, like he, were cuddled together under the overpass consuming and inhaling their amphetamine and glue molecule treats, which inadvertently gave them ice cream headaches. This intake delivered them from bleak realities to that of twirling and dizzy children while fantasies stepped forward as emperors of the spinning domain. At times when they were more conscious of their existence and surroundings (especially when feeling intensely hungry) these transients would beg. They had a method. If someone in a suit carrying a cellular telephone were standing in front of the cash register at a nearby convenience store with a long serpentine tail of customers waiting behind him, one of them would enter the store. Shocked by such a lugubrious display and needing to quickly expedite his exit with his bags, such an individual would give generously so as to not be perceived as parsimonious or niggard in the reaction.

It occurred to him that this word, “friend,” was not really what it at first seemed. If indeed people were all users attracted to others who gave them fresh insight into life or a respite for escaping it, these people were dismissed when that resource was exhausted. Still he wasn’t all that fond of them so the issue did not really matter all that much. He tried to smile at them but he could not. He was feeling sick to his stomach and their faces sometimes spun around in an erratic orbit.

It was like feeling the rush of air and dizzying changes of streets and buildings from the open portals of an old doorless bus that cast its shadow onto a bridge connecting Pinklao street to the area around the Grand Palace—how palpitating was this glue and amphetamine trip. At times it was a stronger feeling of thrust and omnipotent dominion like a surfer who could easily be plummeted by the waves he was riding. The waves, however, were verdant and edible. It was verdant the way nature at times looked like a green-berry cheesecake, and bovine, he wanted to eat it.

Seated under the stairwell of steps doing nothing in particular, he at times took out his pocket knife and engraved a puppet man driven on forcefully by its master to the pleasure and frenzy of rape, depositing its seeds in every possible hole (fertile or fallow). This alone was his only conscious achievement that day in a drug induced but sobering mind where subconscious images usurped their rational rulers. Careful not to look threatening with a knife in his hands, he timidly scraped out a master controlling the puppet man depositing himself in that meek lowly being.

Chapter 6

“Nawin!” Porn whiningly bantered as she confiscated his headphones that were plugged into the arm of his seat and punched him in his chest. “Why aren’t you talking to me?”

“Rachmaninoff,” he said. She did not understand. What did she know beyond the kinetic rhythms of pop culture? It was in her blank stare. The word had not penetrated. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to introduce if not explain something so ineffable and orphic to which a mortal could only awkwardly utter that inadequate word, “beautiful.” He wanted to see the countenance of one being extended. He wanted to change her and take her far beyond the limits she had placed upon herself. It was the best of him that wanted to bring the love of great things to others. It was one altruistic motive in his many selfish motivations for inviting her here. But he knew that like earlier, when they were waiting in the airport, she would continue to bury herself in comic books and the latest American sounds when not engrossed in her French palaver with the cassette recorder. She would continue to disconnect the ideals and harmonies from the plug in the arm of his chair.

“I want to know what you are thinking,” she said. Her countenance was puzzled and remained so for a couple seconds. He loved her so much then. He breathed in deeply and wished outside himself to the cosmic forces that she could stay with those features forever: puzzled, probing, and beautiful!

“Why?”

“Sometimes you leave me, Nawin, and I want to know where you go in those thoughts of yours. Were you thinking of her—Noppawan?

“I’m always thinking of her. I’m married to her.” He reached for her hand but she rejected it and so he smiled brightly, kissed her on the cheek, and gave her a hug. “No, I was probably riding in my artsy whims.”

“Not a woman.”

“No, actually not a woman.”

“That’s not natural.”