Chapter 12
It was no wonder that one set of freaks felt cognate with another set. For him, the sight of the formaline or formaldyhyde-laden corpses at the Siriaj Hospital Museum as well as the girl who introduced him to them seemed to have exhilarated a nascent courage, an oozing, a growth hormone of the mind. New neurological connections were burgeoning or the same ones were reconnecting in different patterns. Anyhow, he felt the inception of something new that made him feel that he wasn’t quite the same: that he was outgrowing patterns of behavior. He was not able to distinguish if his freakishness was exceptional, deficient, or exceptionally deficient to the point of being inept. Certainly if his gray matter made him innately exceptional, his noodles made him less than ordinary. His gray matter was becoming grayer with each dusk of a dying day. Being with noodles so long no doubt loosened this compact tissue of brain into something quite slimy. The use of his brain in the mundane tasks of thinking about the size of meat he wanted to cut with the butcher knife had perhaps cut his corpus callosum. At least he thought so. But regardless of being superior or inferior in his freakishness, this was who he was. There was a history: the history was of being maimed. There was the character of Jatupon: there were dark prodigious forces inside and outside that frame that were ineluctable. No celestial power would rectify his life by making family better than what it was or himself, the sordid bastard that loomed there, as hallowed and saintly as what he once believed monks to be. Nature begot freaks of the worst kind and so becoming a freak in the tossing of the passing years was understandable.
Jatupon’s ego was not turgid. In ways it was self-deprecating. That which hadn’t been squashed by his father and eldest brother, poured into countless bowls, or slapped onto myriad plates had such deformed and stunted growth. He had trouble making opinions about people. He did it with shy reluctance and usually the feelings he had about them never emerged all that much in a cohesive thought. He considered Noppawan Piggy to be his superior in intellect and yet there was one thing about her he had to admit that he detested and that was the abhorrent smell of baby powder that came from her body. It made Jatupon feel like his nose had gotten trapped in a dust storm in which naked and screaming babies flew with the dust in an attack against him. Not all girls and women in Thailand smelled the same but those who had abhorrent smells, although not abhorrent themselves, couldn’t be said to be totally agreeable.
Upon leaving the park his intention was to go to the library and look up information on the peculiarities he had seen in the museum that had smiled upon him freak to freak but he found himself distracted by a large comic book kiosk that whisked him off from this world to that of another. One such comic book was set into the future of 3000 AD and non-existent creatures with little resemblance to anything extant propelled him into problems of their non-existent agricultural and mining planet-colonies and he lost himself there for an hour. How splendid it was to lose oneself wholly and he savored the time there until his left foot fell asleep while he was seated on a plastic stool. Then he stood up.
“Your time is up again.” Jatupon faced a scrawny teenager with glasses who was a year or two older than he was. “Are you reading or buying?”
“Reading” he said; but afterwards he stretched his neck only to see his reflection in the store’s anti-theft mirror. The skin around his eye looked darker and it felt even more painful.
“You need to pay another fifteen baht to continue reading.”
“No, I guess I’ll stop reading. I’ll go,” he said.
Standing there ready to go, his taciturn heart pardoning Kazem who had been the only one who cared about him, he tried to not think about the hot stinging of the swelling around his eye. Instead, he thought about this uncle whom he had only met on rare occasions long ago. It seemed that it only took the frequent utterance of his name and they had been granted a livelihood—a continuing sustenance as if by magic. And yet it had not exactly been much of an effusion of magic. It had been the most niggardly and scanty display that any affluent magic man could bestow and it brought the renewal of their servitude. Before they were restored to a similar but diminished livelihood, they had often spoken of this vaguely real or super-real entity (this uncle by a marriage) as one might think of the early king Ramas of the Chakri Dynasty.
Walking away from the kiosk, he wanted to return to early childhood: of hopscotch, climbing trees with his brothers, Suthep teaching him how to throw a ball, taking cups of ice to the customers so that they could pour out the water in pitchers that were on their tables, skin around the eyes that wasn’t black and swollen, and the time when his body wasn’t being invaded. He could run away for good; but where would he run? There was nothing in Ayutthaya and if he really wanted to run away he would be more invisible in Bangkok. He would need money. He considered becoming a Luk Thung singer of Traditional Thai music. They wore their heavy makeup and pointed golden tiaras for beggarly bits of baht. However, he told himself that his voice probably wasn’t as good as the worst of them and even if it was he did not want to do tricks for a few baht. It was too demeaning and contrary to the aristocratic life he envisioned. There was a famous Swedish Luk Thung singer named Jonas Anderson who had lived his whole life in Thailand but only someone with vocal training and boldness could persevere to be someone accomplished in this musical genre. He could run to Noppawan Piggy’s home. He had the address on the mail she sent to him. But there would be no sense in running to someplace that Noppawan herself was running from and the likelihood of a rich family taking in a strange teenager, and an ex-burglar and quasi-drug addict at that, was more than a remote possibility. An emaciated dog with clumps of fur falling out had a greater chance of being made into a pet. Just as the need for the enzymes of animal protein was one trait of many linking the human to and as an animal, so enmeshed in soul, sentiment, and survival he clung to Kazem for his sense of home and family.
He knew that he was just a collection of molecules being shot out into space and time. Others were the same but they flew away from him in their own deviant paths. He knew. He thought he knew. Did he know? Did he really know anything? Thoughts were so dreary. They enervated him. He got on a bus to go home (that stationary foundation from which outlook, experience, thought, and restoration of energy for movement were generated). Even on such a simple event as going home he was lost in the intricate circuits of his brain, lost in the labyrinth within himself.
But through the window he saw the clear beauty of other beings that passed; and even in the ugly faces there was a posture, a smile, even a vehement depth of lonely despair so uniquely beautiful and yet universal. The bus passed four stores each of which seemed to alternate a presentation of boys, dogs, and combinations sleeping against the facades of buildings. The passing was quick like fingers moving against a keyboard and the sight was as euphonious as melancholy in sound. Then for a second, in stalled traffic, Jatupon found himself looking into the deep eyes of a deformed boy beggar. Jatupon was inside the bus and the boy outside of it, but they both saw an affinity in each other. They were the same. They were both unfortunate beggarly outsiders beaten up by life; and yet he was riding around in an air-conditioned bus. He was not one of the 2 billion people who lived on 2 dollars a day in a rural area on the verge of starvation. Inside the bus the facial expressions of the money collector were stone as death with monotony that was distinct, ebullient, and luminous as sunlight against wind-rippled leaves. A woman sleeping in a seat to his right had a head that fell toward the aisle, straightened, fell again, and straightened like a pendulum.
He might have gone back to work to appease Kazem. He might have started taking orders from the customers with no explanation and let the hours make the whole issue of his long absence mute. His brother would not have made an embarrassing scene in public. The hours would alone have just slowly uncorked it all allowing the rage to disperse slowly and unnoticed. The restoration of old habits would have made the past issue so irrelevant that a bit of the mind would have questioned if his absence had even occurred. It had been his intention to do so when he left the comic book kiosk and it continued to be his intention when he sat on the seat in the bus. Yet a human being fulfilled few intentions. Scholars were sociable creatures who needed meaningless action and cacophony even when it adulterated their aims. Petty government officers on their meager salaries, as well as the well-paid top tier, didn’t need to be cloistered in the political issues that mired the day but yearned for sports columns in their newspapers and genuflected to the action effusing from their television sets. And tired people on Bangkok busses that were plodding their way slowly through traffic had intentions other than sleep but yearned for rest and an easy way home. He was one of the latter that needed sleep; and yet when he was in the cell, which was his home, his mind was active in dread. Its color was gray, its texture coarse, and the molecules that oozed up from it acrid. Within the space of his own head he was vanquished in the gloom, the nothingness, the vanished thoughts of the hollow cavities that were part of one waiting for punishment. He lay on the floor with an old, previously read comic book in his hands. His head was so preoccupied with the barrenness of thought and the feeling of dread that he didn’t understand the pictures and the words. He got up. He dipped up a bowl of rice from a rice cooker, drenched it in soy, chili sauce, and a bit of pepper and vinegar. He did his pushups in front of a televised soccer game and when the game was over he shut off the set and in an hour sleep percolated over him. In his dreams he was in a penthouse on the fifteenth floor and below him were beggars like moving dots. Above the moving dots were moving golden skies of sunset. Gigantic clouds moved through the air in the shape of viruses.
Then there was a punch on his face and it reopened the facial wound causing blood to rush on the floor. In that second his dream fragmented into many dreams and spun out of control. He was no longer in a penthouse but was a sidewalk-based seamster with his little antique sewing machine, a pedal, and a hill of torn clothes he was supposed to sew. He was all alone on a cement cover of a city sewer that went under the sidewalk. Then he fell into the sewer. Self was gone. In the last of his dream or dreams, before he completely awakened, there was no self. There was just the scene of a large park ahead of him, the aesthetic glow of a withdrawing sun, and an old man who bought some phad-thai and found a pavilion near a lake. He sat down and began to eat his noodles, watching the lights of skyscrapers and the fast moving traffic far beyond the lake. The cacophony of boys playing football irritated him because he was envious of it. He put his empty Styrofoam container back in the plastic bag and laid it down. A rat scurried from one flower and fern bed; and dragged the bag into another flowerbed. The old man could hear the gnawing of the Styrofoam. Jatupon sensed that the rat might be himself.
He felt blood oozing from him and uniting as a puddle under his face. Kazem, dumbfounded by the vehement rage that disgorged from him, floundered a few steps in the room, sat down, and whined, “It’s all on me. If you are on drugs or stealing something, I’ve got to get you out of it. It’s all on me. I have to be responsible for you but you just do whatever you please.” His voice trailed away and faltered. He cleared his throat. “You don’t ever behave with any responsibility toward me. I give you days off here and there. I don’t get any. You work or don’t work or work for one of us and not the other based on how you feel on a given day. You steal money out of my pockets and I don’t say anything. Don’t blame me. You’ve brought it on yourself.” Jatupon sat up and glared with one eye. The second eyelid was already drooping from swelling. It wouldn’t open fully and it squinted from a bit of blood that sank into it. He intuitively guessed that his brother knew he was losing control of him. He waited and observed the guilt-ridden countenance and the gauche retreat from the offensive. He judged that the assault had been a desperate one. Jatupon smiled malevolently as of a masochist exuding pride that the pain had only brought the opposite wish of the inflictor. Kazem’s unpaid noodle worker who wasn’t allowed to loosen his fetters and shackles had slipped from them anyway. He had gone out to see Piggy and there was nothing Kazem had been able to do to stop him. Jatupon smiled wider. Then he guffawed scoffingly like a lunatic although the pleasure soon extinguished itself.
“Do you want me to come over there and squeeze the juice out of your head?” The muscles in Kazem’s arms and legs suddenly stiffened like one ready to suddenly stand and attack.
“I’m not listening to you,” Jatupon spoke firmly. “You are a pathetic bully-a fucking ape—and it is the end of it for me. It is the end of it!” Manhood’s conviction and effrontery reeked from his mouth like foul breath and Kazem, who already wanted to wreak havoc on his impudence, flipped him over with the elastic of his underwear like a pancake.
“Okay, swim in your own blood. Swim! Let’s see you drown in it.” Jatupon’s hair was twisted in Kazem’s fingers and his face was in his own blood as the thick leather hand swatted him a few lateral slaps. Then Kazem’s compunction again caused him to flounder back to his seat.
It was the only chair in the room. He put his elbow on his leg and hand on the forehead of his genuflected head. His ideas were discombobulated.
Jatupon was floundering too from more than the nausea of lost blood. He was half a boy and half a man and this newly begotten half called a “man” was having manhood castigated, excoriated, and leaked from him. Callow as he was, he was not just half a man or half a boy the way the Nightjar poem concerned itself with a bird-boy. He was a hybrid of boy/man and God with vast wisdom from fathoms of himself examined from suffering.
He again stared at the other presence in the room. It was a monster, a being of violence, and an unknown phantom. Still this monster was the one who had delivered him from the watery abyss, the one who did not chastise his addiction (at least then he didn’t) but was with him through the withdraws, the one who fixed his bicycle, who had introduced him to basketball and his first beer. Appearing like his brother it was the brother mixed with some type of shadowy creature he could not comprehend and this being, familiar and unfamiliar, he loathed. The elastic of his underwear had been encroached. He had been violated with those fingers. His body had been flipped over like a pancake. He had felt his face pushed in a puddle of his blood. Sitting on the floor, piercing him with his eyes, he wanted to purge this beast from his life. Then a few seconds later his next conscious assembly of understanding only made him want to vanish. He wanted so much of the impossible that second: for the substance of his own life to vaporize swiftly and meaninglessly and opposite of this, to kill the monster and resurrect his dwarfed manhood in his own eyes. Sitting there he felt as if time had ended and that all entities on the Earth were waiting and watching the two of them in silent dread but neither god nor man cared about any aspect of this relationship at all. Things went on as cruel as death. In one second a fly flew and landed in a bottle of water, a dog barked from outside, a rat scurried around in front of the building for food, a family was feuding in the apartment above him, and a car came onto the thin long back-road called a soi.
Kazem looked onto this bludgeoned ugly little face reluctantly and Jatupon felt like a piggish or bovine woman whose acquaintance said, “We could never be more than friends, you know” and she—Yes, she could see. She could see—hadn’t she seen it before? Had she really dismissed those countless earlier smirks of repugnance aimed at her fat enervated face and her clumsy tense body both of which made her nothing. Mother nature made the being breed with the best of bodies to create a good physical specimen in the baby. Sex, romance, or just an intimate talk with a man would not be hers since she could not trigger the pleasure response—not even intellectually. Romantic and sexual inclinations were discriminatory. They were as cruel as death and she would tell him that sex wasn’t intimacy although she wouldn’t believe it. She craved such intimacy more than she could ever articulate and she would not tell him that. She would tell him that being in love was a delusion that one biologically craved to propagate the species. She would say that she did not want to go through the brief illusion of being in love. She did not want to be high in urinary molecules from his underwear flying into her face when he had her denuded and lying on a bed littered in clothes. She would tell him that one generation after another would dance its sexual dance before passing and that she had been fortunate enough to be born a disagreeably unaesthetic thing with a face like a mushy old apple.
Feeling sick and weak, his mind was running away from him. His head was thinking himself a different gender. He was believing that he could hear the content of the feuding family upstairs. The eldest son, having gotten his girlfriend pregnant, had been compelled to bring her into the home and the fight was about him running away from the family every evening after work to drink with his buddies.
Then suddenly, without even knowing it, he stood up, grabbed the television that Kazem had given to him as a gift, and he was running toward him. There he was aiming the television at his brother’s head only to have it reflexively snatched from him by Kazem’s dexterous fingertips. Finally, there he was peering up at it and backing away into the corner where he came from, realizing that one impulse materialized in action had caused a counter action that was about ready to kill him. It had been just one unrestrained impulse that, repulsive to the consciousness, he hadn’t even considered; and it had slipped from his brain slimy as a worm. It had materialized in action and now it had lethal consequences.
“Don’t play so hard, boys” said Kumpee. In Jatupon’s perspective the stink of his smoke-ridden clothes and the beer of his breath gave an acrid and fetid cloud which was miraculously saving him.
Kazem lowered his arms. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. He put the television on the floor relieved at having escaped the worst passion that can fulminate in a man and lose him in the deepest abyss of regret. Sweat poured from Kazem’s forehead and his face became a deep red in chagrin.
“With my woman. If you were to have a woman you wouldn’t have so much time to play with your Jatu-PORN.”
“Where’s our money?”
“Invested.”
“Invested how?” He grabbed the chair and sat down. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. Jatupon was already seated in a corner with his puddle of blood.
“But your worries have ended. The senator’s page visited you, didn’t he? Maybe he was our uncle’s chauffeur. I forget now. You look confused. He came to my apartment to tell me the definite date for the agreed dinner after somehow finding Suthep and informing him. Well, anyhow, it happened because of my own efforts.”
“You visited him and got him to agree to see us? You? How could you do that looking as you do? I tried many times. I don’t believe you.”
“Well, there’s nothing I can do about your hateful beliefs, but all the same I’m telling you the truth.”
“So, you are the big brother looking after all of us now” said Kazem incredulously. He snickered.
“Sure. It’s obvious by age and merit. I’ve never tried to kill one of you in the entire duration of my 18 years. Aren’t I the lucky omen? I saved you both from killing each other and had some additional favorable news to spill out.”
“What was your reason for coming here?”
“Nothing. Just to make sure you were coming.”
“When?”
“Next Saturday.”
“Time?”
“6 p.m.”
“You can deal with him. I don’t want to stay here tonight. I’m finished watching over these two. I’m leaving.”
“Two? I only see one. The other monkey didn’t like you and ran away. And where, might I ask, are you going?”
“A Hotel. A bar. A massage parlor. Anywhere I like although it isn’t any of your business.”
“It seems rather wasteful to me when I have provided this apartment for you rent-free but I guess you can go ahead.”
Kazem laughed sardonically for a minute. He needed to release the shock of discovering the vile hatred that had arisen in himself and Jatupon and the serendipitous arrival of Kumpee, who if worthless at everything else, had delivered them from being sealed into the body bags of unrestrained emotion. “It hasn’t been rent free for a long time. We get billed from the father of your Chinese bitch and we pay the money like responsible tenants-bank transfers.”
“She was a bitch,” said Kumpee pensively. He became preoccupied with this self-absorbed thought. “And her father just couldn’t warm up to what could have been his son in law. I’m seeing her sister now.” Then he stared at Kazem with a specific intent. “Just remember the appointment and that you need to be punctual. Since you need some time away I’ll look after the little one.” Jatupon mumbled a response.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“No, come on. What did you say?”
“I don’t need you. I hate you worse than I hate him,” said Jatupon. Kumpee laughed and then all of them were taciturn for a minute. Kazem folded some clothes and put them in a bag. Kumpee got a bottle of coca cola from a carton in the corner and pulled off the bottle top by wedging it like a lever between the drawer of a cabinet and its handle. He drank slowly savoring every sip.
“Maybe that attitude toward older brothers is what has caused your head to be kicked around like a football,” said Kumpee after Kazem left the apartment and he heard the door shut. “What do you think about that, you little monkey,” he said as his fingers disheveled Jatupon’s hair abrasively and then pulled his ear playfully. “Just you and me, Jatuporn. Jatuporn. Why do you think that you are called Jatuporn?” Jatupon slithered into a dry corner and began to shake. He tried not to cry. “Why did you do that? I’m not going to hurt you,” said Kumpee; but it was really the loss of blood, the trauma, the opaque surrealism of what had occurred that made him tremble. “I see your eyes all watered. You want to cry, don’t you?”
“I want to sleep. I don’t understand any of this. I don’t.”
“You’ve got to know more than I do about it.”
“Well I don’t”
“Mmmm. Well, he was ready to put you in the television. You did something you shouldn’t or maybe you just wouldn’t let him put himself into you. Have you become a frigid bitch? Have you, Jatuporn? You thought I didn’t know about that, didn’t you? You thought that the nickname we created for you didn’t mean anything but just meanness but we had a reason for giving it to you.” He chuckled. “I keep an eye on my boys. That you can be sure of.”
Kumpee sat down beside the sprawled body of his brother and drank his cola in equanimity, from time to time placing the bottle between his legs. “I needed more from my life than this, you know. Do you remember when we were kids and we collected bottles like this. We got a few baht from the stores for every twenty we brought into them. We thought we would buy a Chinese restaurant for father and mother with air conditioning and an electric juke box.” He laughed. “Maybe you don’t remember. You were four or five.”
“I do.” Jatupon really couldn’t remember this but yearning for some unadulterated version of innocent love or compassion not linked to the selfish inclinations that were part of being human, he halfway believed that he remembered and he put his hand on his brother’s arm. Kumpee’s posture tightened. The eldest brother felt squeamish from a man’s hand on him but, not wanting to reject the youngest outright he did not move his arm. Also, a sick curious depravity began to flood out of the squalor of the recesses to his mind. He looked at the half-empty phallic bottle, picked it up, and said “What about this bottle? Would you take in anything hard?” But the youngest brother was asleep and so, a minute later, he removed the hand and abandoned him.