Chapter 11

Jatupon agreed to meet her at Siriaj Hospital. From a bus he took an express boat. Seated there, he tried to read the Student Weekly published by the Bangkok Post but attempts at understanding English were to no avail. The sun and wind together shot him with tranquility darts that took him to an ethereal, unearthly peace exempt from the conflicts of consciousness but also from assembling understanding from the fragments of the pieces to the day that came through his senses in a mosaic. He wanted to understand his place in the world. He wanted to understand the premise of his life that constituted a compromise of the internal conflicts of the mind. But he also wanted peace of mind and he sank in with his ease until he was asleep.

He woke on the hard orange chair inside the boat to a splash of polluted water against his face. Once again he was staring at the waters that gyrated against the boat. He watched the frothy mist from the motion of the boat arise to the window-sized glassless hole that was beside him. Again he was in the world of conflict and for a moment he resented being there as if breathing and thinking deigned him. His conflict was what he was doing now. He was continuing his part as the absent employee and he worried about the consequences. He thought of going back. All he had to do was step out onto any dock and wait for a boat going in the opposite direction; but his legs were like stone. He would not budge. The boat was moving forward and so would he. He removed his sunglasses, put his hand into the water, scooped in a residue of the moisture that did not fall from his fingertips, and cooled the hot throbbing of the swollen blackish blue skin beneath his left eye. He was proud of his courage. Four nights ago Kazem had finally given into his demands for his mail but it had been a calculative maneuver to mitigate their protracted altercation that had gotten out of control over his noodle soup/fried rice-truancy.

His thoughts carried him piggyback at a gallop. There were savage impulses amuck in that instinctual need to dominate in procreation and yet how was it he had let himself become the one who was ridden on instead of the one riding? It was a mystery as to why he should be content to a role so clearly defying the male instinct to be the sexual aggressor. Maybe, he half-wondered or felt in some murky and illusive way that failed to come together as a cohesive thought, it was from not taking on that masculine pose of one ready to preempt his own selfish and sadistic impulses onto others for his own self-gratification.

He wasn’t addicted to drugs any more than he was to love, he told himself. One needed a bit of both. He wasn’t weak. Except once of clearly finding himself addicted and being forced to go through detoxification with some charitable monks (that had been the cocaine period the result of frequent raids of the cash box and an episode of thievery in Bangkok), he believed that his mentality was a strong one. Of course, until the move to Bangkok, the family had ensured that for the past two years he was rarely allowed out of their sight and never came near the cash box. This had assisted his lack of addiction. Even now his interaction with customers was overseen suspiciously. And laboriously friendless as his life droned on (with this new exception if indeed she cared to really be his friend and he was anxious that she should be such) he perceived himself as a freakish aberration to so many boys his age that had normal if not exceptional lives. They walked together in throngs-schoolboys in their light blue knit shirts and dark blue shorts walking the streets, entering 7-11s, clustering in for “All You Can Eat” Pizza Hut specials, or walking hand in hand with girls to the malls. He half hated them. He hated their laughter, which seemed to deride him. Sometimes he wanted to hit against the wall that entrapped him. It was like he was a Mexican and America had deliberately concocted a wall to keep him out. If only it were an eggshell, he thought to himself, he would be able to peck his way out.

And here he was at the Siriaj pier. There was a Dairy Queen, and a Black Canyon Restaurant near the pier and a long winding outdoor market. He wondered why she had chosen Siriaj Hospital for their meeting place and why, given the location, she had not chosen for them to meet in one of those restaurants. Instead, he was supposed to meet her in front of a museum. He meandered in different pathways throughout many buildings until he noticed her sitting on a stoop under a sign that said “Museum” in English. Her hair was shorter than the last time he saw her and her cheeks seemed chubbier. She was dressed in her school uniform.

“Sunthon Phu, there you are,” Noppawan said. Sunthon Phu was an important poet long ago who had risen from humble parents to become a private secretary for King Rama II because of his literary abilities.

“Here I am,” he said. He smiled glowingly. There was nothing about it that was affected. He came nearer to her.

“I was worried that you wouldn’t get my last letter.”

“I got it yesterday in my new mailbox at the post office” he said with pride.

“Good. That brother of yours was really keeping my letters, was he? What a scoundrel .”

“I’ll always get them from now on. Do you want to go into the coffee shop? I can buy our coffee.”

“What happened to you?” She was staring at his left eye.

“Oh.” He realized that he had forgotten to put the sunglasses on his face.

“I got into an argument with him.”

“Over stealing the letters?”

“Yes.”

“ Is he the brawny one you told me about before-the oldest one?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then he should be put in jail for thievery, assault and battery, and being a brawny moron.”

“I have money. Do you want to eat at Black Canyon? You might not want coffee. I never drink it. Just water and cola.”

“If we were to eat at Black Canyon or someplace less dingy—really elegant—I’d make sure my father paid for it. We wouldn’t need money. The whole day could be put on a credit card.”

“No, as the man, I insist on paying.”

“Maybe later,” she first spoke in irritation. She wasn’t interested in his chivalry. “ I want to go in here now. Have you ever been in here?”

“No, what is it?”

“Do you like museums?”

“I love learning. That’s all I love.”

“Not just Laotian poetry?”

“Everything.”

“Now you know why you are my friend. When I saw you reading on a bench-and reading an English translation of a book—I knew that we would get along well. This is a special place. When I run away, I often come here. I spend hours not just learning about natural science but becoming friends with it if that makes sense.” She took his hand and led him in. “Don’t be alarmed,” she said, “Things that are beautiful are often ugly, and what is ugly is often beautiful. I like coming to someplace where everything is true. I hate lies, don’t you? Even ugly truths are better than that?”

He thought about what the mosquito had said. “I’ve been told that truth is sometimes a little ugly.”

“I think it’s always ugly and beautiful-not just a little bit.” They climbed up three flights of stairs. The air in the building smelled like a biology laboratory during the dissection of frogs. They entered: internal organs in glass boxes of formalin; brains; an ear with a joining canal; and then there was an entire baby standing there also in formalin and also inside its large glass aquarium. The child was hauntingly ceramic in a grayish orange or ochre complexion and his body was so tightly rigid. It had calcificans congenita and, she said, it must have been born as a non-movable rock. Then there was a child that had a gigantic, alien head. It had suffered from internal hydrocephalus . It was all there: babies born with amencephaly (some with partial heads and all with no brains); fetuses; four month old fetuses with placentas and umbilical cords (one with hands together as if it were praying or gesturing the “wei”); fetuses that were zygotic twin quadruplets; babies born as Siamese and conjoined twins such as pycopasus twins that were attached from their buttocks and Siamese epionathus parasiticus that each had a brother’s foot inimitably in a mouth; full term fetuses with their chests dissected so that their internal organs were exhibited from the slit; gigantic skeletons; dwarf skeletons; twisted adult skeletons; regular skeletons upright in glass cupboards or in standing coffins each with his photograph above his skeleton—a photograph of what was; fetuses of all sizes and ages; and a naked man and woman in whole with the front skin, muscle and skeleton removed to give full view of their internal organs as one saw their private exterior organs. There they were more than naked and fully intact as if basking in a tanning booth in order to get a suntan-only they were ochre and stiff as ceramic vases and floating in formalin or formaldeyhyde.

He told himself that that from which one should hide he should appreciate since it delivered him from the way he wanted the world to be to what it really was. He repeated this to himself many times to quell the weltering tremble of nausea and to hide his horrified child in the presence of Noppawan. He told himself that seeing this almost delivered him to a new level of maturity. If one could confront this without losing his nerve, he reasoned, he could break from the ghosts of mother and father, the innate need for family, and the wish to be a less damaged “good for nothing.” He could sense the nuance of manhood begin to brew up through him like a hot spring. Passing through another aisle of stocked fetuses, he wondered about his conception. Had it been from loving caresses or a desperate release of stress and frustration on one who had capitulated? Yes, the exhibition was beginning to deliver him into a new awareness and the two of them could sense that it affected the other in the same way and also thrust that individual into a soft sensitive regret for those who were never given a chance to sense themselves against the tactile sensations of the sun, the warmth, the feel of grass under bare feet, the wind, the caresses, the rain, and the respite from inordinate heat and sun. Feeling virile and assured of this new manhood within him, he grabbed her hand swaying it in the pretense of joy as they interweaved slowly around the myriad cabinets. He stared at it all as fully as he could. It was there shelf after shelf with some of it towering so high that he couldn’t see it very well at all.

“I’m so happy that you aren’t afraid. When you come enough it almost seems like there is a spirit hovering above it all and that they appreciate someone being there for them. I know that is silly. I’m not even religious. Maybe it is just that it is very quiet. I often bring my books to the table near the skeletons. I just do some reading. The doctors, the nurses, and the museum curator don’t seem to mind. They just say, “Hi, Piggy.” And again, it is a good place to run away from it all. Maybe it is a bit of a strange place to hide out for most people but most people are scared of their own shadows. If nothing else this museum is a good place to know what death is-or at least come as close as one can. Most people haven’t a clue what really happens to one’s body after death. Decaying corpses would of course be better than this but they are vile to one’s nose with everything going back to the elements and all.” They descended the stairs. She sensed that his hand was very sweaty. “You are glad that I brought you, aren’t you?”

“Sure” he said although he wasn’t fully. He knew that seeing this had made a dark impression on him that he would never be able to shirk. He suspected aptly that this friend of his had intentionally stabbed the little innocence that was in him to match that of her own. Enlightenment had punctured his innocence. Outside, he stuffed his hands in his pockets. He felt a cold numbness in his limbs, a slight coldness toward her, and ennui from memories of his peculiar history that would impair his future relationships with girls. They sat on the stoop.

“I hope you don’t want to run away from me.”

“I’m not running. I’m sitting here with you, aren’t I?”

“Okay, I guess so.”

“When you said “at least this was not a lie,” what did you mean? I mean what are the lies?”

“In society?”

“Yes.”

“There are too many to count.”

“Mention one.”

“All right-religion. My parents are Christians. The servants are Christians. When I was little the servants took me to Sunday school. There, the teachers would always talk about heaven. I couldn’t figure out why if one would be with her family in heaven after she dies, as the church teaches, that wouldn’t mean being there with all humanity regardless of religious preference. If one were to be there with her father and mother, she’d be there with hers, and she with hers, and she with hers, and that seems to me like everyone. After all everybody is supposed to be related to Adam. That to me would mean that heaven is some type of polluted hellhole a million times worse than Bangkok with overcrowding so that you can’t turn around without banging into someone. I don’t know. It isn’t important really. It just shows that nobody thinks anything out. Maybe Heaven is just a Country Club only for Christian Hara Krishnas who say Christ is salvation in rote but I can’t see how they’d extend much of an invitation to me. I never have been much into rote.” Jatupon didn’t know who the Hara Krishnas were or what a Country Club was but these items didn’t detract from his positive impression of her opposition to sententious punctilio. He smiled. This was certainly better than talking to a mosquito.

“Tell me another.”

“Another? All right. I can keep firing them all day. I can’t see how they can claim that King Phraya Taksin was really insane. I mean the man created military strategies that were successful at getting the Burmese out of the country, or at least removed to Chaing Mai. Then he decided to control the church as well as the politics. He became arrogant and said that he was now equal to Buddha and could dictate doctrine and political laws. The people said that he was insane and his military executed him. He didn’t just go from being a great military strategist to insanity and if he was insane, that’s a sickness and they wouldn’t have executed sick people-just people they were scared of.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s easy, Jatupon. Just think it out. Use some intuition and common sense. He just was overly ambitious and they hated him and today we aren’t supposed to think of him at all except as someone who was insane. We don’t even have a road with his name attached to it. Have you ever traveled on Taksin Road? It doesn’t exist. Back then they put the first general in his place and declared him King Rama I. Kings emerged from the Chakri Dynasty when really it should have been the descendents of Taksin. I don’t even know why, in such a poor country, we throw away tax money on these guys.”

“Be quiet. Someone might hear you. We could get arrested.”

“Do you really think they’d arrest 14 year olds?”

“They’d arrest a 14 year old’s parents.”

“My father should be arrested.”

“Why?”

“Do you promise, as my best friend, to not tell anyone.”

“Sure.”

“He raped me. Don’t run away from me Jatupon. Promise you won’t.”

“No, of course I won’t.” He felt nervous. He didn’t know what to say. “I’d never do anything like that,” he affirmed.

“So, you will buy the coffee?” she asked; and on the second floor of Black Canyon the fumes of the molecules of coffee steam and “love” slapped his senses. From the window of the air conditioned restaurant they watched motor gondolas and express boats stir the waters the way housewives in America would watch as their electric blenders stir cake mixes-each wave falling, being sucked into the force that pulled in the new part of the wave and then being pushed out into the wave again. It was all so fast and all so interconnected and systematic that each of the waves looked like frozen motion or like society itself.

He became mesmerized in the weltering waves. He spoke glibly. “Families are supposed to be shelter. They’re really just walls cobbled up from dirt, you know. Mine doesn’t even exist but in Kazem’s head. I feel sorry for him in ways. But sometimes I think I should just run away completely and become a monk.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Monks don’t have sex. At least they aren’t supposed to. As you said, lies.”

“Do you have sex?”

“No, of course I’m a little young for that,” he lied. He looked around the restaurant to make sure that others were not listening to them. “But I don’t want to give up that part of me. I don’t think that is right.”

“My Auntie —well, really the servant but sort of the same except that she must obey me usually-she says I should never come ten feet near a monk since they are sexually repressed and might try to reach under a girl’s skirt.”

“Maybe but I’ve never heard anyone talk that way about monks. The newspapers rarely but that is with individual monks accused of crimes—not monks altogether.”

“My family is a bit different that way. It’s their only good attribute.”

They sipped their coffee and then went to Silom Road on the express boat. The annoyance of standing there in a crowd without a seat became an ethereal essence of truth and beauty for him. He could not remember being so happy. It stayed with him as they road the bus to Lumpin Park.

At a lake, in the park, they rented out a fishing boat. They paddled it chasing one puff of cloud in the hope of using it as an umbrella. They had cheese sandwiches, cola, sticky rice, and potato chips that they consumed intermittently.

“If I stay much longer,” she said an hour later, “they will start looking for me-or at least the servants will. I usually only run away on Saturdays and Sundays. I don’t like missing too much school.”

He knew what he had suspected on their first meeting: that her rebellion was far larger and more personal than anything he had witnessed before. She kept mostly to intangible subjects like religion because her repugnance toward religion had been easier for her to communicate. He felt her rebellion. It stood out like a Long Necked Karen (the native Burmese people living in Chaing Mai who had the tradition of distorting the growth of their necks). He felt her rebellion and it was a novelty for him. It intrigued him and it felt wholly real. He thought, in Thailand one gave the “wei” to Buddhist statues, stupas, shrines, temples, and people who were older and of higher classes if such individuals exerted a powerful role over him; and yet one did this not understanding why it was done. It occurred to him that it was all ludicrous in a way and not just limited to Thai customs. How could she or anyone communicate the exact items that they were rebelling against? Rebellion was seen in the eyes but it could not be readily explained and in ways it went contrary to nature and the social response. Greed and aggression were entrenched in the survival of a being and lay latent but active within every cell but those cells were sugar coated with that cloying substance of Thailand, the land of smiles.

As they paddled back she looked up at the puffy whiff of clouds above her and said, “This is real. Relaxing and being part of the clouds and the second, attaching to the mystery of it all . . . the universe and time-that is the only thing that makes sense, don’t you think?” He smiled and nodded his head in pleasure. Yes, this was certainly better than talking to the mosquito. How strange they were. Their serious probing of life and their awareness of the geyser of unique thoughts that erupted in them certainly didn’t seem Thai. A typical urban Thai yearned to languish if not extinguish himself or herself in strolls in a shopping mall, a movie, a video game, laughter, cellular telephones, beer, and comic books. Jatupon did pursue the pejorative in comic books as most Thai males from five to fifty and the two of them were pursuing their quest of leisure as lazily as the best of Thais; still to him they seemed so different from all others.

She asked about his parents and was saddened to hear of their tragedy. She probed into it further in interest and then backed away when she saw his pain. Kindness and empathy illuminated her countenance. She tried to mitigate his pain by becoming absorbed in her own that she pursued philosophically exempt of emotionalism. “My parents are always moving around in the future. Ambition moves them around like the places on a board game of chess-or draughts played by motorcycle taxi drivers when they wait-with the pop bottle caps-have you seen them?” He was startled by how her ideas had such confluence with his own. She was an augmentation of his own thoughts.

They left the park reluctantly. She did not want to leave at all without assurances and he offered them. He told her that his brother was not a violent person. He said that Kazem sometimes belted him when he really deserved it but that there were plenty of times he deserved it and yet his brother wouldn’t touch him. She seemed to believe his assurances and went away.

As she vanished from his senses his empty hollow mind was filled with images of half-headed beings, twisted skeletons, rigid corpses like old ochre vases, the naked man and the woman floating in their formaldehyde glass coffins with their fronts carved out for the display of their entrails, the fetuses and their placentas, one child that had such a gigantic head and another one that had been born like a solid never feeling motion. These images attacked his consciousness. It seemed to him that the world was a loveless and ceaseless factory that replicated over and over again manufacturing slightly damaged and terribly damaged products with impunity. He paid his two baht to the lady in the glassless window and went into the public bathroom. He wept for those who had deserved better than this. Then his weeping poured into himself. He knew that after what he saw he should not want anything more from his life than the noodles that sustained him and yet he did. He knew he should not want a more purified love than what Kazem extended to him and yet he nonetheless did.

The hours of that spring day came and went indistinguishably from other seasons, and all days were clones with stoic dispositions. His majesty, King Rama IX, a few hours earlier, had changed the seasonable robes of the Emerald Buddha like a girl dressing a doll. He then presided over the plowing ceremony with its blessings to the rice goddess; and watched one cow predict the agricultural future of the nation from its bovine appetites—the cow wandering over to preferred troughs filled with anything from brandy to barley, beans and rice, or just plain water—instinctively consuming something or another interpreted as conditions prosperous or economically disparaging.

Further into the heart of the city, Suthep slept removed from the mooing of omniscient cows in Sanam Luang which stood on an island of dirt where kites had flown surrounded by inundating dark black exhaust fumes and fast, obnoxious wheeled beasts, honking their loud voices as they passed each other. Tucked in his smaller cell he rode the REM of being. He dreamed he was on a motorcycle leaving his uncomfortably tight partial apartment that was comfortably free of brothers and awkward moments of catching them together. Hired to cater his fried rice with chicken he cooked it, put it on paper plates, and sealed the plates with plastic wrap. Then he put them in baskets on opposite sides of a bamboo pole. Balancing the pole of baskets on his back, he drove to a government building. Why the banquet only had that one dish of “kow pat” (fried rice) was a point that the dream did not address. Also the street names were not those of the Dusit area but those of central Bangkok. As he came near the building , a limousine hit him and hurried off. Blood poured from the orifice of his face. There was nothing but gray and a firm belief he would die. The ambulance drivers, none of whom were paramedics, came to pillage him of his wallet and watch. He got up, Thai boxed them for his things, and realized as they ran from him in fright that he was as ethereal as a cloud. And then his parents came out of nothingness and he told them that they needed to go away since he (ghost or man) was now a free agent and did not need them any longer. As he got back on his motorcycle someone knocked on the door.

He woke up but his brain was retarded in an earlier being. As he heard the knocking he imagined that Jatupon was lying beside him and listening to his scurrying feet move toward the door. So many years they had slept in the same room. They had slept side by side until a few years ago. Did he love his brother so much that he would wake up with him skirting around in his dreams? Maybe he did since the habit of being with him was long. The youngest sibling was so much of his past and he had been accustomed to him without major aversion. The habit of being with someone without major repugnance was indeed the only thing that constituted fraternal love; and yet, little as it might be, it was what the particles of black space in the universe were created for.

Suthep, slapped a cap on his head with the visor inverted to the back of his head and greeted the knocker in his underwear.

“A le nuh?,” (what is it?), asked Suthep as he straightened the cap. It was a man in livery asking the surname of this family of impoverished brothers. Suthep imagined the stink of his armpits as he addressed the guest and the staleness of air in the room which was in deep need of a deodorizer. He began to feel foolish but he kept his boyish poise while the man tried to withhold his laughter. He didn’t hear the question. The man repeated it and Suthep wanted to prevaricate. Then he reluctantly said that his last name was Biadklang. It was the senator’s page and they were finally invited to meet the apotheosis that had given them their living.