Chapter 5

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

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

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

“Why didn’t you get out the glue?”

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

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

“I know.”

“What did you do this afternoon?”

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

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

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

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

“I had some. I always get some.”

“How?”

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

“Do you mean you steal it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you go to Ayutthaya?”

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

“To see Grandmother?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Here?”

“To Bangkok.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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