Chapter 13

It was their third time playing the board game of Monopoly that week and Porn sensed that another ineluctable habit was being imposed onto her more from within than without. She often deliberately tossed the dice directly into his token when it was near her side of the board but mostly her rolling was with a lethargic rattling in her palm and the apathetic dropping of dice from her numb fingertips. Once she spilled the content of her glass, which then flooded over Marlborough and Vine Streets as well as Community Chest. She snowed her popcorn crumbs over two colors of property. He silently blamed her clumsiness on the vodka that she had mixed into her cola. From time to time he could see irascible facial expressions cutting through her guile of complacent concentration and close lipped smiles but he told himself it was just a bit of competitive strife or tipsiness even though he knew better. At the beginning of each game, for the brief period that it lasted, he felt for certain that she enjoyed playing and discussing life with him. He was right about the former. For her the beginning of the game brought the rush of accumulating play-money, gibbering her attempts at English to play the game, and having one monotony replace that of another. The game was one way of killing an hour or more of a given day as sedately as a hot bath. She hated cold weather to such extremes that, outside of her irregular attendance at the language school, the nearby grocery store a block or two away from this distant campus had become her only cultural attraction. She was waiting for spring but meanwhile her life was becoming as frigid as a housewife.

“It certainly is coming down,” he said as he heard hail beat against the windows. “You surely aren’t thinking about going out in this.”

“I never do,” she said.

“I mean you can if you want.”

“Yes, master.”

“You get to massage my feet for that comment, dearest. I especially like it when you go down on each toe the way you do; but, as a gentleman, I don’t force that on you.”

“No, master.”

“Do you like anything about the classes at all?”

“The students and the teacher are old, Nawin. There’s nothing to say.”

“How old?”

“Old. Retirement age. “

“Hmm... it is strange that they should be immigrating to Canada at an old age like that.” She ignored him. “Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know Nawin. Roll your dice.”

She knew that the only force really binding her on that chair at the kitchen table was herself. She was uncomfortable with his tenderness because it shackled her at his side but out of courtesy to him she tolerated the situation with only a few major grimaces. This quality time together had occurred for her sake but she minimized its effects where she could. She cynically told herself that these games were his pathetic way of finding relief from his solitary ways. She felt sorry for him and this sympathy ameliorated the loathing she was beginning to feel for the introverted bore. Looking back on what she knew of him, she assessed that this wooer of whores had always stayed in safe circles. In Thai parties that they had attended following his exhibits he had never been much of a mingler and had relied on her to be his public relations gadabout. Here in Canada he wasn’t a celebrity. For him there were just classes and an occasional sale of a painting. She had no role with him here. She was a bed partner and a grocery shopper. Even when fulfilling the wifely forgery of grocery shopping, she was curtailed by financial considerations. If she didn’t buy generic food of inferior taste he reprimanded her for overspending.

Porn asked if Park Place and Boardwalk were real properties and he told her that they might be. It was a question that she had also posed two days earlier but Nawin responded to it with the same cheerfulness as if there had been sense in asking it a second time. She asked if he thought they were well known New York City properties and he told her that was quite possible. She glanced at their quality time together through the slow perennial movements of the second hand. These movements of the long second hand were so wobbly as if 60 seconds were like climbing over a mountain range. She would not only glance up at the kitchen clock but also the window as if expecting the snow to be melted and birds singing in her window. She had wanted his attention and now that she had it she realized that this was just aspirin dulling the headache. There was a bigger problem. Being poor and lacking choices had caused her rabid craving for more of everything just as something long ago down deep in him was probably responsible for his artistic brooding. The past was always sucking one into its whirlpool.

He rolled the dice and moved his token. “Oh, Old Kent Road-I want that.”

“Why do you want worthless properties like that?”

“I don’t think either of those two properties are worthless.” He smiled as radiantly as a child pleased to have one of his best friends participating in one of his favorite games. He closed his lips in a tight thoughtful smile. “You know what I’ve been thinking about?”

“No.” She didn’t really care.

“When you met Piggy for the first time.”

She frowned. Was this what they had become: a couple of tycoon wannabes, two individuals acting like a married couple, or worse two people acting like an old couple reminiscing about their early days in front of bored games or a deck of cards? They did not have years together-just two or three months of knowing each other—and she thought he had no right to reminisce about anything. As much as she hated the past, the present was equally bad at absorbing one in its reality. She had now become his wife because she was with him at present. His wife had been relegated as one force that had brought them together because she was not immediately accessible nor was she sexual. “Oh,” she said disinterestedly. She rolled the dice with more force and moved her token from the present to the future. “I’ll take that railroad,” she said. Still she couldn’t help being influenced by him and for a couple seconds she was absorbed in that immediate past. That day had been good but strange. After Noppawan had taken her shopping at Chatuchok Market for clothing, they briefly went into the Butterfly Farm and Insect Museum (a neutral alternative to the deleterious proposal of Siriaj Hospital’s dead people museum that made Porn gasp). The butterflies were fine. She enjoyed seeing their colors flittering around the caged park although the encasement of dead insects in the adjacent room was not to her liking. The face bug with its human camouflage on its back was for her as frightening as it was fascinating to Noppawan. She watched this wife of Nawin. She was the type that would put her nose and glasses up against, in her opinion, the damnedest of things. When they arrived at the married couple’s second home on the opposite part of the city he was fixing a meal for the three of them. He was preparing salad, toasting hamburger buns on a barbeque, and microwaving meatless tofu hamburgers in a culture that was all his own. As the two women chatted on the balcony Porn tried to overcome feeling like a face bug caught in a key chain. As they ate, dusk elongated and then intertwined their shadows before night approached. Soon the remnant of the day became a violet, a purple, and a black and she felt like a child first introduced to colors through crayons. They watched the lit barges on the river and gorgeous glassy skyscrapers with lit angular tiaras. Strangely enough she felt at peace with them as if they were more than friends but family and the words of model or prostitute did not exist. Still it was strange and uncomfortable because it was so strange.

He dreamed that he was in her mind, that there was adrenalin in the rebellion, that this adrenalin was the meaning of it all, and that the meaning of all luminesced from her. Immediate relatives and some more distant ones had her life planned for her; and her parents, the main instigators of the status quo in their family, were rocks. They didn’t change apart from greed that intensified with years and tiers. Stratums of higher and more violent winds raged them in insatiable appetites. Wants fed more wants insatiably. They stayed on the same growing pieces of land, had the same opulent homes and efficient factories (although more and more of them), matched political ideas to whatever brought benefits to their wallets, and with these government positions they implanted such aspirations on the little brother’s mind with the idea that he was clay by which a conqueror with a double edged sword of business and politics was formed. After going into the monastery to have his foray as a monk and finishing his university education he would be this and once she found a man in college she would be that.

She, the girl, would be less of the plan but still, years into the future, they would partition a piece of their land and give it to her husband. She would be expected to reproduce her higher beings on their land allowing the elderly parents to be spared loneliness by the sounds of young voices. She would be expected to take care of them as their servants had taken care of her and to absolutely inebriate them against any suffering as if Buddha’s attempts at bypassing human suffering had been an avoidance of it. This would begin in a decade or so (such a quick passing of time). She would be expected to succumb to female yearnings-this needing of another to escape the lonely void, this need to reach out for the silk of human flesh, to consume, to care, to be intermingled entities in love, and reproduce. And yet she had been nothing but a little doll that they had shown off and shoved into a storage room especially when she was dirty or naughty.

And then her bedroom became a limb of a tree and there she was transforming into an adult female mosquito and he was becoming a male one. There they both were in complete maturity. He did his dance and he rubbed his legs so as to attract her with his sound. She was ceramic in her stiffness. Her skin was ochre like the dead bodies at the Siriaj Hospital museum sunk into their glass caskets of formaldehyde. Yet her eyes were lively even though they looked at him so askance and distant. She smiled with her closed insect lips. The smile was ingenuous and warm but wry. He could tell from these infinitesimal muscular contractions and relaxation in her stony insect face that she did not want him to think of their friendship as a relationship and the words passed from brain to brain (hers to his, his to hers, and hers to his like a mutating ping pong ball) something to the effect that a being was born selfish and two selfish beings together were a compounded selfish knot and so something new was in order. Something new was in fact in order. There, ardent in her eyes, was the relationship of her parents: it was based on hoarding property and power. It also was based on begetting emotional servants for their old age and that in particular was abhorrent to her. But he, the male mosquito that was programmed for copulation and no other task, loved her. He had to since he needed her for the satisfaction of his hungers and a deliverance from the past. He continued with his male-on-the-make dance. She bit into him. His blood was on her lips.

And when he woke up he wasn’t himself. His ideas were discombobulated and he could tell that his consciousness or sanity was like a loose button on a thin thread dangling from his shirt. He was ill and numb as if all of his senses were bandaged over in gauze. He woke up fully, checked his face in the mirror to see that it was still the same, and washed it. He tried to desist from many thoughts. Thoughts were pins stabbing him. He turned on the television, muted the sound, and saw images as the hours of the day became vanquished. Then Kazem came back early to bring him some food and in so doing he suspended their mutual reticence briefly.

“I have some food for you,” he said in disgust.

“Thanks” Jatupon responded in insolent despondency.

The next day it was the same. Kazem came back briefly with some food and a new pair of sunglasses for Jatupon’s face.

“I have some food for you,” he said in disgust.

“Thanks” Jatupon responded in insolent despondency.

“I also have some sunglasses for you” Kazem said in disgust.

“Thanks” Jatupon responded with a surly and begrudging tone of a nearly mute volume.

He controlled his contempt out of an instinct for self- preservation. He wanted to keep himself from being bludgeoned with the sledgehammer of his brother’s fist or beaten with the leather skin of his slaps. Kazem wanted to ask if Kumpee had said anything more about their dinner engagement with the senator as an effort to establish its veracity-a senator they called uncle as a disingenuous ploy to bring them into a greater stratum of wanting and needing, winds of higher and more pleasurable velocity.

The mosquito buzzed around Jatupon’s blackened eyes and then around the opened bottle of glue. With his wings he made a pejorative click the way people use their tongues when they shake their heads. Jatupon was not glad to see him. He did not want the condemnation. At first this glue-begotten ride had been an enjoyable thrill. The newness of a newborn was at that time gleaming out of his orbs. He was like a child in wonder of himself flossing his toes in the grass, having his hair massaged by the winds, and chasing god in the clouds. Now the mosquito was here spoiling the solitary party of one which was steadily waning.

The mosquito greeted him in English. “Hello, little man.” He thought it was Kumpee at first but, to his knowledge, Kumpee didn’t know any language apart from the strident sounds of Thai and was more in favor of using the word “monkey” in place of “little man.” Jatupon looked down at a gigantic insect that was nonetheless smaller than himself. He responded in the same international tongue with a hello. “Where did you learn your English?” asked Jatupon; but no sooner had he done this than he realized how foolish the question was since the mosquito was an extension of himself. For some reason he was both cognizant of the fact that the creature didn’t exist and yet believing in him. It was undeniable that if Buddha was right in claiming that the self was a delusion there was a chance that instead of the mosquito being less real it might be more real than himself. It was true that the mosquito wasn’t afraid of a man but a man was afraid of a mosquito. Wasn’t that, he asked himself, proof that the one who wasn’t afraid was more real?

“Where did you learn your English? “asked the mosquito.

“Music, TV shows, story books from the library, Newsweek in my more ambitious times, cartoons mostly.”

“Well, then, me too” the mosquito said. It paused and then pulled out a cigarette from its gums and lit it without a match by striking it against the metallic hair on one of its legs. “Another day without going to work?”

“Another day.”

“Taking it a bit easy?”

“Taking it a bit easy. Yes,” answered Jatupon.

“I would like to know why you have a black eye and a swollen face.”

“You know everything and yet I’m supposed to believe that it hasn’t it occurred to you that I’m not wanting to think about this-about this situation I’m in.”

“I understand that but am nonetheless curious what you have to say on the subject.”

“Very little, if you don’t mind.”

“All right. Are you snorting glue because of what has happened to you?”

“Why ask so many questions?”

“Because I am cruel.”

“Yes, you are, you know.”

“You don’t like me at all?”

“Oh,” Jatupon sighed, “I do like you in ways.”

“What a charming endorsement! I elicit the same response everywhere I go. Oh well...truth doesn’t have to be a comfortable realm. It rarely is.”

“Yes,” said Jatupon pensively, “I imagine it rarely is.”

“The pain is so overwhelming you can’t work?”

“The boredom is so overwhelming I can’t work. It is a rot-a rot under my hairnet. I can’t do it-reflexes every day and not with—”

The mosquito waited to hear the word “him.” “Go ahead and say it” was in the mosquito’s thoughts but it was Jatupon who articulated this oblique command, “Go ahead and say it!” to twist the direction of the conversation .

“I don’t understand,” said the mosquito.

“Aren’t you wanting to give me your lecture that I have to survive?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything but you are meant for more than this dizzying work and the instinct to survive is thrust on all living things in all actions. You can’t but help obey it to some degree.”

“I can’t do it any longer.”

“You might have a nervous breakdown if you were to continue. Kazem was your link. It’s gone now.”

“I’d rather die than go back to it now. Die in the streets if I have to.”

“I think you are zipping up your pants again and finding them too tight. You are shedding your boyhood.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes,” said the mosquito pensively. “Unfortunately, it was your best trait.”

The mosquito dissipated with the smoke of Jatupon’s cigarette that he rested and twirled in his fingertips. Smoking was his new habit that he pursued in the hope of having a more insouciant image, which with practice, he could learn to believe in. Boys of himself at earlier ages came and pressed their noses near him as he had done long ago to the glass outside the Dunkin Doughnuts Restaurant in Ayuttayha. Long lost versions of himself at various ages passed up against him and passed him by. They too dispersed with the gaseous midst of black carbon smog released by the traffic. His head was spinning around skyscrapers and billboards. They, he, a single homeless woman who rented out babies to increase the chances of getting more substantial alms, two dogs copulating, and all, were dwarfed in advertisements for shark fins for the man with refined taste, Electric piecemeal billboards for Singh Beer and cellular telephone companies with new images rotating with the pieces, plain billboards of pimpleless white skinned Thai models selling or hustling some facial cream, flashing and mutating signs advertising various self-improvements seminars at different universities and at the Convention Center, neon animations of Barcelona’s Bangkok tour for the Invitation Cup Football Match, and advertisements for every international and domestic product imaginable thrust into the hands of consumers in the form of flyers. Indeed, it was obscene enough to make a man become a monk: orgasmic organisms, sensation of void.