Chapter 4

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.