Chapter 6
Bound for his uncle’s home in the far north of the city, Kazem was forced to reposition himself in the back of the bus next to a bucket of swishing water and rags. He swatted the mosquito that was hovering over its sodden progeny. He beat it towards the baldheads of a couple of monks in front of him who had usurped his seat impudently. From his new and more uncomfortable seat, which often lost its cushion as he sat there, he looked out of the window and tried to beat back the inferno of hate for Kumpee that flared in the nerves throughout his body. He stared down at what appeared as the moving edge of the road from which businesses and pedestrians, from the corner of his left eye, ricocheted. He fingered a slit of the vinyl blue upholstery of his cushion in a vaginal preoccupation passed onto males through the inheritance of this cellular knowledge called sexual instinct. Low levels of guilt oozed from him more subtly than foaming breakers of beer in a mug and yet he didn’t feel that he had done anything wrong.
This moment was no different than other times of malaise in the past. He wasn’t specifically troubled about the fruition of his wanton fantasies to meet his uncle in the hope of using him for some money. Money should never rest. It should be spent or invested. If it were invested it would be used to make more wealth or for philanthropy that ameliorated thievery. He agreed in a vague way with Kumpee who vaguely inveighed something to the effect that a bit of money from a more affluent pocket into a poorer one helped the economy and was a just act. Likewise, he was not bothered by the release he had gained earlier in a bit of sex with his youngest sibling. This activity was to him just an extension of a back rub in a good massage compounded in a bit of sportive wrestling. It was a due owed to him for undergoing the stress of looking after the younger brothers and keeping the principle of family alive. He was acting his part of the big brother no different than he always had since Kumpee was continually negligent in performing the role. There were no specifics to this malaise he felt. The malaise was brought on by the wistful craving to go beyond the confines of his containment and yet reality, petty and limited, told him to use what was there under his feet, in his sight, and what he could touch. A man in the confines of his life used what was under him.
What being did not use the Earth?
He continued to finger the slit of the vinyl blue upholstery in a vaginal preoccupation. He wanted to feel beyond the hole of malaise that was as empty as the hollow whistling of a wind through a cracked door or that numb sensation of lying alone, the fantasy of his masturbation eluding him, and his semen flowing on his skin in a last vestige of a river. Using others was as unconscious as a reflex but the malaise came into the equation when he saw what he had to use. Why didn’t he have money to wine and dine a female in the mating protocol like any male black-tipped hang fly? Why did he have to cajole, beg, or charm an avuncular affection from this remote individual who wasn’t related to them by blood?
He began to stare at the driver and a boy who sat near the front window in a padded hump that went over the gearshift. It was just like seeing a self in miniature that had gotten lost and ensnared in the thickets of time: father driving the bus and this boy seated on a padded metal covering that went over the transmission. At times the boy touched the clutch hoping to one day guide the mammoth beast like his father (the boy believing that his father was the perfection of all things possible). A plastic red container of ice and water was on this pedestal where the boy sat and from it a straw stuck out of the lid and he drank and ate fish chips that were in a plastic sack. He just ate and drank as the bus circled around its route of the city. How drab it all was but for a boy and yet believing his father to be the perfection of all things, such self-restraint was possible. Their father had had such a job when Kumpee was a young boy. For a year or two of such journeys, sitting there with the highest admiration for a father, he was filled with the highest love that was initiating him into the positive dimensions of manhood and responsibility. When his father lost his job and worked on the street alongside of their mother, he launched his tirades against the younger brothers who were “suck-calves” on his wife. He hated their neediness and as the spankings continued, Kumpee began to oppose these gestures. Such self-abnegation caused him to become the full brunt of the beatings.
Having been given time alone, Jatupon scraped up his stolen collection of loose change and ran off hand in hand with his freedom. Having no responsibilities for the first time in his life apart from the night sports that usually happened in the mornings, his life was becoming a purposeless abyss. He personified his freedom and together they broke beyond small basement windows and imagined portals to real places. Together, they went to see the life that fulminated within the streets of the city of Bangkok. Kazem was gone so they did not have to be there to hear his expletives about the older brother’s thievery and the younger brother’s disappearances. The disappearances were ones Kazem attributed to Suthep chumming up with Kumpee to have a bit of money to play snookers. For hours and hours they were lost in the movements of traffic, the brown and Chinese faces, movements of strangers on the sidewalks, and the swirl of infinite numbers on the quest for money, happiness, and adventure. He read faces and movements from his spreading feelers. They too wanted money bestowed onto them to squander at will in all forms of self-indulgence. They too wanted to squelch their routines to live their dishonorable lives in the quest of sensuality. To have resources and freedom to run around loose as a goose in a department store was something they all yearned for and seeing these pedestrian shoppers of the sidewalk, with more money than he, made the boy hunger for better things.
Freedom was becoming old as he continued to walk with her into the crowds but she rejuvenated lasciviously when his eye spotted someone not in the shopper’s swirl. The cravings so attractive to Jatupon were missing in those deadened eyes and passing from him he fell into the others. Membership was free. It was lack of hope that was given so generously to the majority of the world’s populace that was indispensable to them. Lurid as family, fetid as Kumpee’s shoes, here they were and here he was with them; and yet they were his own or what he assumed was his own—the little that he knew of himself.
It was a family of addicts, addicted to family or even a concoction of family, cobbled together within the affinity of pain and the tangles of neurons like brambles pricking their consciousness with old travail at every turn: memories that they couldn’t free themselves from. Within this desert of cacti and brambles they poured destructive chemicals and suicidal inclinations to kill and enlarge their brambly world. They were landscape artists of their personal deserts: hating, destroying, and replanting their cacti and brambles with each new whim. Here he was with a new family—a mosaic of complete strangers who were not related to him nor were they relating to him or much to each other. Still, it was a surrogate family nonetheless succumbing to an infinite current of darkness to which they all had understanding. In many ways they were wiser: they knew that the insatiability of desire that made one propelled to breed, work, and buy was not going to stop. They knew that no one in such circles was going to find contentment. They were all going to fail miserably. They knew that there was a deep discontent in the human psyche that yearned for destruction and death. In the course of being degraded by significant others they had somehow gotten excluded from the participation of such narcissistic, consumeristic appetites and that the salvation of compassion would not be forthcoming. This benign pastel family sat together on the slab of cement under the overpass while over them, on the overpass itself, were the trinkets sold by salesmen, homeless elderly women, mothers, those who stunk from being unable to bathe off their rotting surface of scaling skin, and deformed slabs of flesh spread out on parts of the overpass with fidgeting partial limbs. They all had nearly empty cups of one baht coins and the most unfortunate of them could testify of dark currents deeper than regular people could imagine for one moment. They, his surrogate family, knew that there was not just one blackness but despair had myriad blacker and bleaker hues.
Under the steps of the overpass sniffing his glue while these transients already riddled in amphetamines and alcohol (at times borrowing his glue) smoked cigarettes incessantly, his mind swept away from him like a butterfly fluttering by. When he first met them in this spot their first words were to offer to him cigarettes but he told them that if he were to put one in his mouth it would remind him of the fetid one with his fetid shoes and socks littered everywhere, the one who had stolen his parents property upon their deaths and had abandoned them to starvation in the great city of Bangkok. These transients had the understanding and listening skills of trained psychologists and offered unto him a piece of bubble gum instead which he gratefully accepted.
Still, a thought preoccupied him off and on. He wondered why they were all seated there in such a confined space; but within a few hours the storm clouds moved overhead and the rain deluged the streets making him forget about one man complaining of his jock itch and scratching himself, another that cried and looked up into the clouds, and a third that kept wanting to barter off his torn sandals for Jatupon’s sneakers and kept calling him “uncle” even though he was ten or fifteen years the older brother. Across the road he occasionally saw umbrellas sail out to the gray of the clouds. One of the other five transients was repulsed by a spider that crept onto him in its effort to escape the rain, cursed at a rock in his shoe that would not leave the obscure crevice of the sole, and then in one of his shifting moods made a declaration of happiness that they had found such an inconspicuous spot where the police rarely harassed them. The woman transient gave herself to her man so completely that when he was angry, happy, or sad, she was more this way—so little did she understand her own mind, having become nothing but an extension of his pleasure and pain.
Sometimes silent and tacit, these transients who were continually judged by others, judged the sincerity of his callow rebellion with their stares. A few times they went beyond that to a more pronounced judgment. “Don’t you have a mamma to go to? Your mamma’s calling for you to come to lunch,” said the one with the woman. That time the shoe barterer laughed so hard it churned up mucus into his mouth, which he spit into a crack in the sidewalk that already had its share of gum and cigarette buds. “Mamma’s calling,” said the woman. “Lunch is ready, honey. Mamma’s calling,” she repeated or at least he thought she repeated. Maybe none of them had said anything. He wasn’t quite sure.
Jatupon turned away from them and slipped off his tennis shoes, smelling their soles to make sure that they weren’t overly fetid. He looked at one of his bare feet composed of roadways of veins and early wrinkles of epidermis. He thought to himself that an unrecognized universe had existed right there in his shoes. He sniffed his armpits. They were fetid as glue but he liked the transmission of the sweat molecules up his nostrils.
He deeply inhaled the glue and then held his breath allowing the fumes to permeate within. He repeated the process four or five times and for the most part he, they, and all went away in a haze. It was like being blindfolded but instead of darkness there was a soft patch of white haze. At first it startled him and he wondered if this ethereal gaseous mist was Saddam Hussein’s lethal spray upon the world and yet he felt giddy in this laughing gas. When his mind was able to register the fact that they were seated next to him, the haze made the man and his woman, the shoe barterer, the sky crier, and all (transient and non-transient, imagined and remembered) such special creatures. These transients were sordid and brainless but, especially in the intense inundation of fumes they were the most extraordinary of life forms. He was almost moved to kiss each of them on their foreheads. From this pillar of light the mosquito, dressed in Buddhist attire and carrying its mask, came with the force of God. Its feelers were like acid and when they touched Jatupon his clothes seemed to sizzle and burn away. He was naked with a smashed ant sandwiched between a fingernail and skin. He remembered that a minute earlier he had been trying to direct it away from his leg and in his clumsy misdirection at the appearance of the pillar of light there it was under the nail curled up in fetal agony.
As the mosquito slowly descended he could see tragedy more clearly than he ever did when not snorting the fumes, and yet it rolled off his mind weightlessly. He was giddy in brotherly love and yet naked, he wanted to copulate with the world. Even more, he wanted to reproduce his ideas with her. He sensed that all humans fell victim to this substance: they got giddy in love and reproduced, they gained meaning in their lives from this feeling, and then after nature got them to beget children, she plugged up the dopamine somewhat like the waning high he felt with his brother. He felt the insect monster inject him with the malaria of tragedy: random images were kicked about in his mind like starving dogs allowed to propagate on the streets incessantly from the non-interference of Buddhist principles. He saw all the suffering species from an aerial perspective for he was being carried around on the wings of the mordant mosquito that had scooped him up on its back. Buddha knew that tragedy abounded in recycled life but Jatupon could not figure out if Buddha tried to break the recycling of life like a coward who couldn’t endure pain or if he left his protective palace to understand the magnitude of human suffering for the masses. The story was full of contradictions. He thought, “Where are you taking me...straight...now spinning...now plunging...more G-force than I think I can stand.”
“Into yourself,” it shouted.
“That’s a cruel place to be,” Jatupon said.
“Yes, it is,” admitted the mordant entity. From their distance distinct forms were difficult to ascertain but he knew that he was far outside himself and to be outside of it into a world of motion and forms made him feel relieved. But from a couple of indecipherable forms in movement he halfway made out and half way imagined a half-naked baby crying on the outskirts of a park. It crawled alone at a distance from a cook. The cook halted her work to get him. He cried loudly at each initiative at trying to appease him. He didn’t like being held. He didn’t like the banana put in his hands. Finally, she placed him in the bucket of water that contained her dirty plates.
“So innocent and yet calculating,” said the mosquito. “It was wanting in that tub of water all along.”
“Oh, do you see them too.”
“No, not really. Anyhow, based on what you see, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Agree that he crawled away so as to cause his mother to put him in the water?” He laughed. “No, he is just a baby. I don’t think he is that developed. I don’t think he is that self serving.”
“Are these two forms you are now seeing outside of yourself too?” asked the mosquito.
“Of course,” he scoffed but he did not know.
Then he was descending or falling —falling in a diagonal descent on the mosquito’s back, falling onto its feelers, and falling from it entirely. There he was a brown boy in the pool on the roof of The Mall Ayuttaya with goggles on his face and wearing spandex swimming trunks. He looked so fashionable despite his poverty but the poor and discontent always found their stealth means to master petty thievery and a sullied self-image was easily forgotten. There were imitation mountains and waterfalls all around. He swam to the opposite side of the pool and said hello to a foreigner who sat on a rock letting the force of the fall hit his feet. The foreigner ignored him and again started swimming his laps. Then, feeling that he had been rude, he returned to the boy and asked him his name. The boy smiled and said an easy two-syllable name, Nawin. It seemed like an easy name for a foreigner to remember. After an uneventful attempt at conversations in two different languages to which neither party could understand the other one, the foreigner swam off. Still the boy was persistent, swimming over to the foreigner when he rested. This prompted the foreigner to go to the locker room to change sooner than what he would have done otherwise. The boy followed him. He accosted him while he was at the urinal and looked down onto him. He tried to come in when the foreigner was in his cubicle taking a shower. His motives for doing so were ambiguous ones: he wanted a foreigner friend even if this man was so much older than he was, he wanted to really learn the international language, and although he did not really have sexual feelings he would have done anything for a bit of money. As the man dressed on the bench Jatupon, the boy, put his hands together in a mendicant grasshopper pose with palms sandwiched together and held before his face in the “wei.” He opened his hands with the opening of the wallet.
A door of a shower booth opened. It was the mosquito drying himself with a towel.
“Nothing like a good swim followed by a warm shower. You got to meet an old friend today. That’s nice. Earlier you never mentioned this memory. I guess it wouldn’t have been a particularly flattering portrait to share with anyone. It borders on prostitution. Just when I was feeling sorry for you as the abused brother I learned of this. It adds a more complex intellectual dimension to your character, don’t you think? It makes you less moronic somehow.” Jatupon felt a metamorphosis and returned to his 14 year old body. Again he was riding on the mosquito’s back naked as a blue jay and his hair dripped water. He couldn’t confirm or negate the previous memory. It was vaguely familiar.
“Don’t you believe that was you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jatupon said indifferently.
“You don’t think so?”
“No it’s not, is it?” He began to choke on his saliva. He coughed. “Why?”
“Oh, dear. Are you okay?”
“Yes. Why?”
Why what?”
“Why is the self such a fearful place?”
“Why not?” said the mosquito. “Alone, shut up in one’s own hardened shell there is no logic—just passions running amuck.”
Tragedy and suicidal wishes clogged up his head. He did not like seeing bits of himself crawling around naked as a baby’s ass. He hated wondering if any of his brothers would come back to the apartment or fearing having to beg alone. He got up.
“Did you decide to finally go back to your mamma?” asked the man who had the woman resting her face in his lap. The woman picked a wild dandelion from the crack in the sidewalk and then reached her hand up to Jatupon’s shirt. She put it in his pocket. “Here is a flower for Mommy. You can give it to her when she fixes you supper.”
“My mother’s dead” yelled Jatupon with vehement hate and repugnance as he wadded up the flower in a fist and threw it onto the sidewalk. Then he walked away.
A tuc tuc driver, slowing down in passing, beeped the horn at him. The taxi looked like the distorted shape of a fly. He wished that he had just a chunk of the money Kumpee had plundered. With it, he told himself, he would buy his own motorcycle and become a self- employed taxi driver for his age surely restricted him from getting a job with the Bangkok Metropolitan Authorities. This, he told himself, would be far better than sitting on the monkey bars near the door of a bus clanging the tube of money upon one’s knee. Besides, he didn’t especially want to be one of the many nameless beggars applying for jobs with the Metropolitan Transportation Authorities.
He veered somehow from the sidewalk into a labyrinth of outdoor hallways that ran between stands and quasi-stores, under canvas canopies and through the smell of incense that came from a table that contained a 2-foot Buddhist statue. Upon finding his way out by charging through crowds and hangers of clothes, he heard the blaring of pi phat music, saw a vegetable market, and smelled redolent papayas, durians, watermelons, pineapples, guavas, and tangerines. Further along he smelled tom yam soup, grilled squid, goo-ey tia nam (rice noodle soup), khow laad nhaa gai (rice with chicken and bamboo), and other dishes in an outdoor restaurant. He passed silk stores, jewelry stores that catered toward ruby and sapphire-loving foreigners, and fast food restaurants. Then he went into Robinson Department Store.
In the restroom he relieved himself at a urinal that was furthest from the cleaning lady since her mopping presence there made him nervous and had the possibility of clogging him up. Then he sat down in the food court. His head was in vertigo like small children turning themselves around in the grass or the routine of one’s petty kinetic life. He often noticed affluent men walking around with girlfriends or wives in that male gesture of the hand of one arm clasping the other arm behind the back. The gesture conveyed that they were beyond the third world now. They had money, Bangkok had everything, and they would shop as befitting their status. He wanted to be them. He wanted out of his own skin to be a different person entirely but there was no exit for him in fast motion. The only consolation was in always evolving beyond that one seed, that one dividing cell that had started his life. There was still hope.
He saw a father and two girls with their many bags. He wanted a father like that instead of the one who had made him afraid to stand up, sit down, comb his hair, put on his pants, talk, or be silent without being excoriated. Only arduous work had offered him a respite from that man’s criticism. Only work had offered him that escape from being the cockroach running from his heels. Family wasn’t so ideal. At least his wasn’t. He was always cravenly scurrying away from one or more of them and vibrations they made. His mind spun around more wildly. He kept wishing that it would stay stolid and poised as statues of the Garuda and Kinnara, mythological creatures that permeated Thai art, literature, and dance.
He tried to focus in on beautiful ideas of family. He tried to breathe them in like the smell of drying clothes in the breeze or the smells of life replicating itself eternally in the verdant greenery on the outskirts of the city. All he could do was summon memories of Kumpee and their parents incessantly driven toward chasing any scheme that would put a few extra coins in their hands; Kazem’s secondhand treatment of his destitute brown Burmese woman a couple years earlier; Suthep whom he shared certain childish sympathies; and Kazem who was his protector. His head hurt and span: in school, out of school, struggling for subsistence as a group, the heads of the group dying, the move to Bangkok, and a thousand phantom faces that plagued his mind, exacerbating the throbbing. He tried to think of monks in their saffron robes with strapped metallic bowls dangling from their shoulders in which shopkeepers requiring blessings placed rice; the sweet taste of rambutans when the spiky core was broken and the transparent succulent egg was overtaken; and motorcycle taxi drivers with cardboard and pop bottle games that, with the tap of the nails of their fingers, kept their time of waiting from overwhelming them in boredom. A persistent fly over the table made him nervous and he thought that perhaps to counter the truths his subconscious spewed out in the form of the insect and his own need for stability (not just his environment changing but he, himself, was continually changing) he needed to invent a god for himself if nothing other than the God of Dirty Underwear. The persistent fly continued to besiege him so he left the department store and returned to his friends.
The “friends”—he did not know their names—seemed content with their circumstances. They, like he, were cuddled together under the overpass consuming and inhaling their amphetamine and glue molecule treats, which inadvertently gave them ice cream headaches. This intake delivered them from bleak realities to that of twirling and dizzy children while fantasies stepped forward as emperors of the spinning domain. At times when they were more conscious of their existence and surroundings (especially when feeling intensely hungry) these transients would beg. They had a method. If someone in a suit carrying a cellular telephone were standing in front of the cash register at a nearby convenience store with a long serpentine tail of customers waiting behind him, one of them would enter the store. Shocked by such a lugubrious display and needing to quickly expedite his exit with his bags, such an individual would give generously so as to not be perceived as parsimonious or niggard in the reaction.
It occurred to him that this word, “friend,” was not really what it at first seemed. If indeed people were all users attracted to others who gave them fresh insight into life or a respite for escaping it, these people were dismissed when that resource was exhausted. Still he wasn’t all that fond of them so the issue did not really matter all that much. He tried to smile at them but he could not. He was feeling sick to his stomach and their faces sometimes spun around in an erratic orbit.
It was like feeling the rush of air and dizzying changes of streets and buildings from the open portals of an old doorless bus that cast its shadow onto a bridge connecting Pinklao street to the area around the Grand Palace—how palpitating was this glue and amphetamine trip. At times it was a stronger feeling of thrust and omnipotent dominion like a surfer who could easily be plummeted by the waves he was riding. The waves, however, were verdant and edible. It was verdant the way nature at times looked like a green-berry cheesecake, and bovine, he wanted to eat it.
Seated under the stairwell of steps doing nothing in particular, he at times took out his pocket knife and engraved a puppet man driven on forcefully by its master to the pleasure and frenzy of rape, depositing its seeds in every possible hole (fertile or fallow). This alone was his only conscious achievement that day in a drug induced but sobering mind where subconscious images usurped their rational rulers. Careful not to look threatening with a knife in his hands, he timidly scraped out a master controlling the puppet man depositing himself in that meek lowly being.