Chapter 7

“Nawin!” Porn whiningly bantered as she confiscated his headphones that were plugged into the arm of his seat and punched him in his chest. “Why aren’t you talking to me?”

“Rachmaninoff,” he said. She did not understand. What did she know beyond the kinetic rhythms of pop culture? It was in her blank stare. The word had not penetrated. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to introduce if not explain something so ineffable and orphic to which a mortal could only awkwardly utter that inadequate word, “beautiful.” He wanted to see the countenance of one being extended. He wanted to change her and take her far beyond the limits she had placed upon herself. It was the best of him that wanted to bring the love of great things to others. It was one altruistic motive in his many selfish motivations for inviting her here. But he knew that like earlier, when they were waiting in the airport, she would continue to bury herself in comic books and the latest American sounds when not engrossed in her French palaver with the cassette recorder. She would continue to disconnect the ideals and harmonies from the plug in the arm of his chair.

“I want to know what you are thinking,” she said. Her countenance was puzzled and remained so for a couple seconds. He loved her so much then. He breathed in deeply and wished outside himself to the cosmic forces that she could stay with those features forever: puzzled, probing, and beautiful!

“Why?”

“Sometimes you leave me, Nawin, and I want to know where you go in those thoughts of yours. Were you thinking of her—Noppawan?

“I’m always thinking of her. I’m married to her.” He reached for her hand but she rejected it and so he smiled brightly, kissed her on the cheek, and gave her a hug. “No, I was probably riding in my artsy whims.”

“Not a woman.”

“No, actually not a woman.”

“That’s not natural.”

He chuckled. “There are other things than loving people.”

“You are an unnatural person, Nawin.”

He smiled and thought. Maybe dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, the components of love, were at work whenever one cared about something. Maybe being troubled by Palestinians blowing themselves up was love. Certainly Rachmaninoff was love.

“Her glasses are ugly, you know. They have thick frames and what really makes them ugly is that they are dark against her dark skin. No, what really makes her ugly when she wears them is that the lenses are thick like binoculars. I bet that even when she removes them every night before she goes to bed she probably looks as plain as burnt toast. Your wife isn’t pretty, Nawin.”

He chortled. “You’re right,” he said as his eyes looked down shamefully. He thought about telling Porn that Noppawan never removed her glasses when she went to bed. It was partly true. He had even had sex with her once or twice that way. Then he had second thoughts and decided that some things were better left alone in the dark. “Can I go back to Rachmaninoff?” he asked while mildly shaking his headphones in the air.

“No you can’t. Thanks for asking. When are we going to New York City, Nawin?”

“We haven’t arrived in Canada yet.”

She stood up, stretched, and then crawled over his lap lasciviously as she looked out of the window. “This flight is too long,” she said.

“Maybe the pilot, co-pilot, hijacker, or whoever is driving can park for a few minutes on a cloud and you can get out,” he said.

She sat back in her seat. “I think you are angry at me for saying that about Noppawan.”

“No,” he said indifferently. He liked hearing truth but he felt guilty being amused by some of it. He changed the subject. “Do you want to change to my seat so that you can look out?”

“I’d get sick looking out onto that sea of clouds for long.”

“Why do you want to go to New York City?”

“What’s in Canada, Nawin? It’s got a few walking snowmen but what else? Snowy landscapes and cold temperatures good for penguins. When someone thinks of Thailand it is always Thai silk, temples, Buddhist statues, nightlife, and beautiful girls like me. What is the symbol of Canada?”

“Snowmen,” said Nawin as he chuckled, “and Canadian dollars.” He was enjoying the conversation.

“What are they: these snowmen? Are they just Englishmen?”

“That but also Americans who didn’t want to fight against King George... Frenchmen, of course in Montreal.”

“Why don’t they have kings now?”

“Well, Canadians do have the British monarchy. Canada is a commonwealth.”

He didn’t go further because she sighed from intellectual strain.

“Didn’t you like Noppawan at all?” he asked with childish vulnerability.

“No,” she replied thoughtfully. “I liked all things about her. I liked her completely. It is hard to believe that anyone should be so wonderfully odd.”

He liked that response exponentially. He knew that she would never say anything so true. “Montreal will be fun. A little bit of Paris and a little bit of New York City.”

“Laos, Nawin, is a little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt poor Thailand.”

“It will be like going to the Thao Suranari fair in Nakhon Ratchasima.” That was one of the largest fairs in Thailand. This thought triggered his memory of a smaller fair in Bangkok.

This avuncular stranger, a member of the parliament and the former governor of Pattaya, had informed Kumpee that the fair held in March was coming to a close this year. This fair, run by government ministries to raise funds for the Red Cross, was near the Parliament in the area called Dusit. Tickets to enter were sold at 200 baht each. The two other brothers—all, like him, boys with layers of manhood like aluminum foil wrapped over the small crumbling pieces of cake that were themselves-did not utter questions. Had Kazem robbed Thai Farmers Bank, Siam Commercial, and Bangkok Bank entirely it wouldn’t have made any difference. The psyche needed a degree of ebullience. This was their respite from worries about survival to which drugs or snookers had been ineffective distractions. A bit of it insulated them from the attitude of doom that would eagerly zip them up into its body bags.

A woman wearing a pointed straw hat, who had a 2-year-old baby cuddled around her neck, thrust herself before them. She solicited them to her table of snake blood refreshments seasoned with dried monkey brain. She was one well-seasoned in salesmanship. She knew the cajolery to lure daredevils who would come to such a fair as she knew the approach to children whom she would sell her krathongs, banana boats of flowers and candles attached to banana leafs and Styrofoam sailed onto the river for good fortune during each Loi krathong festival, or Buddhist rosaries and necklaces to old women during religious holidays.

“ Please come over to my table, boys.” They smiled and came. “ I know you. You think I don’t but I do. I can see into hearts-hearts wanting to be men, wanting to end boyhood. You’ve heard those stories about men who became more than that from drinking a bit of this. The stories aren’t true. They are stupid. Nobody has ever done anything like that; but the real parts of the stories are gaining courage and strength. My husband was in his teens when I saw him for the first time doing what you are about to do. I watched him the way those girls over there are watching you now. Anybody would have second thoughts about this. Anybody would. It tastes horrible because it is strong in courage and strength for those with the courage to drink it. If you can do this you will never run away from anything again. Instead, you will have it on the run. This is your only time to conquer your fears and do something naughty while the police are sleeping. Whatever you do, make sure that you put a few coins in the box to help the Red Cross.” She pointed at the plastic box at a distant corner of the table. While Suthep inserted a few baht into the hole she directed herself to Kazem. “Are those two your brothers?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I know you won’t make them ashamed of you. It’s just fifty baht each. Look. People are staring at you. You’ve got to do it. Drink!”

“Drink, money man,” reiterated Suthep.

He glared at Suthep. “Hey, I’m not paying for me alone. I’ll do it for the pure pleasure of seeing you stand there all night looking into your cup.” Kazem paid for three cups. Jatupon stood there stiff and frightened. Starting from the oldest to the youngest they drank down their beverages. The liquid molecules of hell were a hundred times that of the airborne ones from Kumpee’s socks and shoes. All of them choked and coughed. All of them swallowed some of the blood heathenishly but spit out most. It was followed by a sip of watery and caffeinated whiskey that had been diluted and adulterated in cola. Normally such open liquor drinking would have gotten everyone arrested especially when it involved selling to minors but since some of the proceeds were going into the public fund on this day it was overlooked. While the brothers were given a second shot of whiskey again diluted in cola, new customers came to the woman anxiously. She led them to her table and sat there with the squalling, squalid child. The baby was restless on the apron that she wore. Conscious of how a repetition of her spiel could spell out insincerity and a customer’s aversion, she attempted to wait silently as they debated doing this. She muted the child with a firm hand pressed against its mouth. Before she could make the sell she reflexively responded to the smallest degree of wetness on the apron and let her child urinate away from the sidewalk and her virility stand. The ground did not eagerly swallow the fetid and sweet liquid and his recidivist urine came back to the sidewalk with the insistence of a foul stream. Past shoe salesmen on a sheet, shoe repairmen, comb and battery salesmen, noodle workers, and lottery representatives—unlicensed businesses that abounded everywhere- they entered the gates of the fair. At kiosks, the three of them threw darts, shot basketballs in moving hoops, and bounced balls against walls to knock over bottles for prizes. They continued doing this until the infancy of night murdered the sun allowing it to slowly die, languishingly sliding off golden rooftops of temples. When darkness unfolded around them, they paid to see a woman put her face in a plastic box of scorpions, elephant trainers whose elephants walked over them to enter into the crowds where they picked up humans with their trunks, and oarsmen in the facsimiles of royal barges competing against each other. The boats had the same body and countenance of dragons just like the television shows they had seen of the kings’ ancient boats that were housed in the Royal Barge Museum.

The night and its dark appetites were mature in full insurrection. They had eaten their share of rice and chicken topped with cotton candy, and yet not cowering, their stomachs craved for beer so they headed to a nearby bar. Before them a child was walking slowly on the steps that rose up to the bridge that went over a canal. He slammed his fire-snappers against the cement watching the air burst before his feet. They passed him to quickly fulfill the surfeit of beer that was part of their general yearnings. They yearned for so much—these three young men. They yearned for relaxation with beer; they yearned for friends and places away from this fraternal group that they had been conceived into and forced to work with; and, except for Jatupon, they each yearned for a love to come their way so that they would not be lost in themselves. Jatupon yearned most to be naively complete like that boy they had passed. Jatupon had once been like him: fascinated by his own thoughts and sensations and self-contained. In late boyhood a boy mastered independence that in infancy and early boyhood he struggled to achieve. It was all thwarted, however, by the upsurge of sexual feelings which made a young man want to bond cohesively and addictively to others. The progress of late boyhood was razed in a brief year or two.

Strangely, the world was a dreamy place and from the modest display of fireworks being shot over the canal there was a dreamy idea of connectedness and fraternity in the psyches of these young men although such ideals varied from moment to moment based upon their interpretations of the environment. Lagging behind in serpentine movements of dreaminess but eager for connectedness, Jatupon hurriedly caught up to his brothers only to lag behind them again. It was time for Heineken, Singh, or Bush (not those two presidents). It was a time to celebrate and dunk the self in artificial dreaminess like one bobbing for apples. Jatupon looked up at the sky when he and his brothers reached the other side of the bridge. Then he looked down at his chest. A sweat bee hovered over the glands in his opened shirt like an oil worker ciphering the ground. He shoved the industrial exploiter away. He felt awe in how complex it all was: one thing feeding on another. He wondered if, after the immune system conquered a virus, it consumed it. He wondered how much of his parents’ bodies would have been consumed by bacteria in decomposition if they had not been cremated. He wondered if things were so clearly defined. Maybe a part of his parents was alive in ways that could be sensed but never understood or explained.

It was no wonder, as they sat there drinking beer in a pub on the other side of the canal (remarkably able to afford drinking beer at all) that Kazem was happy: after all, the uncle’s gate had opened up to him when he talked into a speaker. It was also not so strange that his mood of elation had for a short while, when viewing the scorpion lady, gone awry. Seeing the son of the Ayutthaya landlord who had rented his family that small space for their restaurant was depressing. There he was in his fine clothes with his wife and two small children. Kazem had thought to himself that as a rich man poverty had not ruined his inclinations-this man, not much older than himself, copulated in the right hole.

Suthep, sandwiched between his two brothers, drank voraciously without any strong inclination to run away. He preferred being elsewhere but elsewhere without money was nowhere. He preferred playing snookers and trying to woo a young girl to be somewhat interested in him while playing against his buddies. Here, however, he had no friends. The city was entirely new and he didn’t know anyone. Once, in Ayutthaya, he had gone with a herd of those wolves to capture a park whore. He and his buddies took her to a cheap guesthouse where foreigners often went and had their spasms within her. It had been his first time. He would prefer to be with his friends but this wasn’t so bad. Drinking with his brothers was like playing football with them once again or fishing with them at the edge of the river.

Somewhere into things the beer changed to whiskey and it was from that bottle of whiskey that the mosquito and his female counterpart climbed out and shook off their wetness. When this canine shaking of the wetness was not enough, they used the paper towels as bath towels. They were less grotesquely large at this point but returning to their monstrous shapes by the moment.

—What was the dinner like that Kazem attended?

—It was not a dinner, but the sip of the man’s coffee in the den. It consequently led to the proposal of a dinner.

—And did he accept the proposal?

—He did.

—On behalf of the family of brothers?

—That would seem to be a correct assessment although the eldest was not expected to attend. No definitive date was scheduled because the senator hesitated about this issue. It was a tacit declaration that could only be read in a scarce trace of caution on his countenance. It indicated that he was reluctant to be associated with these thugs. This irritated Kazem and yet he pretended as if he wasn’t bothered by it. He probably told himself that he needed the time to rehearse his lines.

—What would he need to rehearse?

—His part as the benevolent older brother. He thought he was that but he had trouble convincing others of its veracity.

—I don’t understand.

—A typical female reaction. Let me be more lucid. It is my impression that he intended to use this first meeting for future ones where he could use sympathy as a way of extorting money from the aging man for this group of leeches and quasi-pariahs.

—As Kazem and the senator/former governor of Pattaya/former uncle-in-law drank coffee together, what was the lure that kept him interested in these boys? After all, he knew them only by name apart from that time or two of being irritated by their noise when the two families came together. That was over a decade ago. Isn’t that right?

—Yes, you are not ignorant. It was 11 years ago. I believe his new founded interest in them was what they call empathy?

—Empathy? I know about that. It is a rather rare and abnormal form of behavior sometimes seen in those evolving beyond their species. From the research I’ve done on such aliens empathy and compassion seem to be the only emotions that aren’t destructive and hedonistic. In small quantities all emotions aid judgment calls in social situations but unfortunately they are produced and expended in bulk. Unlike other emotions that are rampant, empathy and compassion tend to be quite rare. Could you elaborate on his nascent burgeoning of empathy for them and the disingenuousness that prompted it?

—It was no different than their aunt who hustled a marriage out of him years ago. Kindliness and loneliness, from what I can tell, have always been his weakness. It was a simple calculating maneuver on Kazem’s part, really. Kazem affected being uncomfortable and shy. He waited until this uncle asked directly about his circumstances and then he gave a modest biographical summary of their move to Bangkok after selling their parents assets. He was careful not to mention Kumpee, the need for money, or any real description of how they were living. The uncle’s attempts at finding out information on those putrescent issues were only marginally successful. As a result, it seemed to the senator that Kazem was earnest and unassuming. He became more curious and anxious to help these pariahs as a result.

—And can you be more specific on how this was done?

—It’s rather mundane. I don’t wish to really.

—Human studies and our intellectual copulation require more information. One would have to be ignorant to not know that or male.

—He chitchatted, my dear, in a logical sequence that was a bit desultory at times. Humans call such an inexact order “variation.” After he told the location of where they were living and that the move had taken place because of Kumpee’s desire to be near his girlfriend, he answered the senator’s question on what his brothers were doing in their state of unemployment (Jatupon with his comic books and Suthep with his snookers). Then he moved to large ideas outside of his personal life: the upcoming elections for prime minister, the question of the government’s role for the flood victims in Hattayai, and if the senator would run for re-election in a couple years. It was done to create a mystique about he and his brothers as well as to elicit the approval of the senator who preferred people who could break out of their own skins. It was deferential. It was noble. It was all of those things that were manipulation in a consummate performance. Kazem played the part so well that he even began to think that he was this shy, vulnerable, unpretentious, and caring person despite trying circumstances.

—Did he directly attempt to exploit the man’s feelings of sympathy for their plight or the senator’s loneliness?

—In some respects he did. He reminisced about his mother whom this high governing uncle had sympathy. The senator of course entertained this sympathy because his wife (their mother’s sister) had always carped, disparaged, and vilified her for such a marriage to an illiterate street person. The senator never forgot his sister-in-law’s birthday even after his divorce. To be specific, Kazem was seated before the senator drinking coffee and eating doughnuts when he ironically spoke of how he missed the scents of flowers his mother would bring into the home or the smell of a freshly cleaned floor. It belied the truth of this porcine creature whose domestic tendencies had surrendered to male nastiness early into marriage and motherhood. The sad lonely tone resonated with the senator. It strummed the harp of his heart.

—What are these three brothers doing at present?

—At present they are drinking beer and celebrating with some of the money that the senator gave to them.

—Did the senator give money that quickly?

—No, he dismissed Kazem after tiring of him. He said that he needed to return to his work. And then as the teenage boy was leaving a servant told him to return the next day. It was then that a sizable amount of money, by the standards of regular Thai people, was given to him.

—Suthep doesn’t seem as happy as the other two.

—He is happy with the money and the beer but his happiness sinks down with the dying fizz of the beer but it rejuvenates again with the fizz of the next beer. His behavior can be attributed to a bit of repugnance toward the two companions at his table and a bit of general moodiness aggravated with alcohol consumption. He really has been so moody ever since becoming a teenager. He was so nice to Jatupon as a child. Oh well, the world is continually in flux.

—The youngest brother whom they sometimes maliciously nickname Jatu-PORN now seems to be sad. What could he be thinking at this most auspicious evening?

—He is thinking of Suthep thinking that these lovers are repugnant.

—And I assume that Suthep is now thinking that he is thinking this.

—Now you understand why these creatures never go anywhere.

—How alone these fickle creatures must be never sure of the acumen of their own ideas. These ideas seem to change from minute to minute based upon the chemistry of the food they put into their bodies, their perceptions of their own failures, the limitations of work and routine, their hormones, the firing of neurotransmitters left and right, the pleasures gained in social interaction, memories from the past, the mood generated from the environment, and the well-being of the body. How lost they must feel wincing from their forlorn inner selves by clinging to others around them. Is not one of them self-contained?

—No, my dear, I’m afraid not.

—Your summary is very orgasmic, my husband.

Mosquitoes 1 and 2 changed angles, this time looking into each other’s left eyes. They were mesmerized in each other’s beings and their wings flickered from the internal fire of passively intellectualizing life’s energetic insignificance. Then they looked away from each other and breathed deeply before once again looking at each other face to face with less intensity.

—Wouldn’t you say that the older brother, Kazem, possessed a lot of effrontery to go to the speaker on the brick wall connecting to a gate, push the button, and talk so glibly? Could a clarification be gained on how it is that he could have acquired that entrance?

—It could. Such an individual gained entrance by stating that his mother, prior to her death, had prepared a gift for her brother-in-law in celebration of the Songkran Thai New Year’s festival

—And what gift did he present to the man as they drank tea and coffee?

—He presented to the man a Buddhist necklace his mother had given to his father.

—And the politician took it?

—Not immediately. He of course resisted; but Kazem argued persuasively that it had been intended for him. It looked new, although the politician wasn’t under much of an illusion that it was. Still, in case it was a gift from the dead, he couldn’t really refuse it. That would have hurt the brothers and the memory of the woman.

—And as the brothers drink beer together, do the younger ones notice that this somewhat expensive trinket that Kazem had heretofore claimed as his own and had worn around his neck is now missing.

—The more perceptive one called Jatupon notices this and infers that he really did give a gift to the senator and it was probably the necklace.

—They do play their games of trying to affect future outcomes. They’d be better being as insentient as cows. The youngest should drink his beer and be happy to be with the big boys engaging in the naughtiness of illegal alcohol consumption. Instead he seems worried.

—He’ll be returning like a bound slave. The noodles will bind him once again when the equipment needed for the sidewalk restaurant is purchased. He feels that he did not take advantage of the brevity of freedom.

—To do what?

—He doesn’t know either. Even more troubling, he is also assessing that his brothers are growing up. He wonders if they will soon desert this first family. He wonders if for the pleasure of women they’ll jettison the earlier notion of family as insignificant, weighty, and likely to cause them to sink. He wonders if they will cast it out like a bad dream that they want to forget. He knows that they are biologically driven by hungers like a mouse cognizant of the trap but eating the cheese anyway.

—-What would he do as a cast away?

—Well, there are ways of survival. One can be out there selling his body one moment and then find his head shaved and a robe on what had been out there as a marketable commodity.

—Such a transformation from prostitute to a monk really occurs?

—Indeed, it does. When the goals of money don’t arise well from prostitution, being a monk is a position that commands respect and an escape from destitution. It has a morose facade but in such a somber demeanor like that of Jatupon it has its own splendor

—What splendor can be had in such a pointless and austere profession?

—Well for one, a given monk might put on some military clothes and go off to the local masseuse for a Thai massage of the most dissolute dimensions. It is an easy thing for a young monk to do: just take the expense for the whore out of the monastery coffer

—When Buddha was born in Lumpini Park in Nepal was it so that men might engage in the recidivism of their animalistic natures?

—All you need to do to answer that question is see the types of whores parading themselves in Lumpini Park in Bangkok, Thailand not to mention the male prostitutes waiting for money and sexual experiences in the shadows of the trees. Everything changes. Good men are distorted into Gods, and philosophy is made into a sordid religion. Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism-it is all a perversion of the founder’s ideas.

—How do you know these things?

—What things?

—About the meeting with the senator

—How do I know about the meeting with the senator?

—Yes, how do you know this?

—How do I know this? mumbled the mosquito confoundedly.-They are in Jatupon’s head.

—And how does he know them?

—How does he know them? Because of the night when they were drinking together...the night of the fair...were you sleeping when I was talking to you?

—No, I heard you earlier. So it came from Kazem’s mouth and Jatupon’s conjectures. Those doesn’t seem like reliable sources.

—What?

—Those don’t seem like reliable sources. The two mosquitoes stared at each other nihilistically. There was silence.