Chapter 9

A little disparate to the poem, Thao Nok Kaba Phuak, he dreamt he was a black version of a nightjar cradled by the Laotian queen whose pigment was as light as a northern Chinese woman. He suckled at her nipple with the violence of his beak as she scavenged for dew to appease the parched walls of her throat and berries that would provide her with fortitude against failing strength. Her breast bled from his appetites. She grappled with waning confidence that she would find a way out of the labyrinth of trees that overtook her. She wanted to kill this disgusting child that by its birth had usurped her of status and had prompted her exile from the kingdom. This feeling embroiled her psyche but feelings did not thwart her motherly instincts for the strange creature that she named Jatuporn.

Then, immediately in front of the park bench there was a woman before him who carried two heavy buckets of ice and drinks. Startled to an awakened state by the woman asking if he wanted anything to drink, at first he gave a negative answer, “Mashai” but then he changed it into a formal feminine ending, “Ka” which could mean “yes.” How absurd he must have seemed to this woman speaking like herself instead of using the masculine word, “krub” or the neuter yes-word, “chai,” but at the time, he had thought of himself as a bird when he spoke and so there had not been any gender confusion whatsoever. He paid the woman for a bottle of water. Then a man with his stinking body holding a bag with little bags inside came to his bench. Jatupon bought two of his bags and began strewing the ground a few feet from the bench with the dust of crackers, breadcrumbs, and corn.

He did this slowly while trying to solve his indecisiveness on whether to stay or go home. The thought of suicide seemed to him even more repellent than the two major options but it was a tiebreaker he wasn’t going to reject absolutely. He had a pocketknife. He thought to himself that when night came upon him he could find an obscure area of a tree’s shadow in complete darkness away from the gas lamps and slit his throat. He looked down. Pigeons were beginning to come to him and eat what he had allotted to them. He liked giving to ostensibly small and insignificant creatures. When the bags were empty he saved himself by his impetuousness and returned on bus #203. He dangled from the steps because of the lack of space provided to him. Standing there on the precipice of the step he looked in the bus at the crowded Siamese passengers. At moments this mosaic fusing of contortionist-bodies seemed as a mass of amorphous human flesh, a multi-head, body, and limb monster, which choked air and breath from the bus and, worse, had the outline of Kazem. Bus #203 zoomed along the river and then over the bridge of the Chao Phraya #River. The cool breezes slapped hard against his flesh. He felt like the 15-year-old nightjar that took its first flight from home, strutting its bird-body independently and finding itself watched attentively by the princess, the older queen’s daughter—only in his case he was homeward bound and no one was watching him. Matter of fact, he thought, if he were to slit his throat his body might after some hours just be kicked off into a corner of refuse somewhere to rot.

When he arrived in the basement cell no one was there. He sat down in front of a strange box. His kneecaps never splayed in the normal outward direction of crossed legs. Moreover, attempted prayer and television trances in imitation of the usual posture had always brought to him extreme pain making many people over the years perceive him as someone who was both anti-religious and, worse, counter pop-cultural. Kazem and Suthep had vehemently criticized the shoddy construction of his kneecaps. Kazem had always been pleasantly indifferent to this subject. As always, all he could master before the box of chocolate was an irregular sitting posture that looked like the letter M or W depending on the perspective; and most likely, and most comfortably for him, the letter N as in Nawin. It was indeed a strange sight: the letter “N” in front of a small box of Russell Stover chocolate candies with the parent company of Kansas City, Missouri, USA on the label. Inside, more than half of the chocolates still remained. He helped himself, almost feeling like an American spreading out relaxingly over the world with Thailand and other countries as his footstool, carefree and gormandizing chocolate down his gullet. He almost felt that nothing bad could ever happen to him again. And then he remembered being six years old standing with another dirty boy in front of the Dunkin Doughnut shop near a mall in Ayutthaya looking through the glass window that was a partition between them and the customers who were inside. Even more, it was a partition between feeling hungry and dirty to the immaculate ones consuming their doughnuts within. He made funny faces and danced in front of the window where a young man and woman sat at a counter looking onto the commotion and air pollution of Bangkok. He pretended to kiss the woman through the glass. She laughed and he kissed her more. Then as the man was putting his doughnut into his mouth, Jatupon opened his own mouth widely as if, through the glass, to rip it out of the man’s teeth with his partially rotten fangs. The couple laughed and the man motioned them inside. They ran in and were given doughnuts. Like then, sweets had an antithesis of meanings for him. They made him feel as one of the elite, carefree and happy and yet at the same time reminded him of the disparity to which he was one of the largest masses—that being the underclass.

Half an hour later, from his gluttony, the box was empty. He drank some bottled water and fell asleep to more images of Laotian queens walking through cocoa fields with their little black birds. When Kazem came home with more shopping bags and saw the symbol of a more auspicious life that he wished to share with his brothers totally devoured by one alone, he wanted to vituperate him if not slap him around a few times. He restrained himself since, for other reasons, he did not want him to again run away. He saw that Suthep was not in the room for whatever reason and this absence triggered in him a desire to molest the youngest. It would be a punishing pleasure, a desperate hegira from one’s solitary domain to brief moments of coupling, banging onto empty walls, the release of stress, and the intimacy of “love”. And yet he again restrained himself by comparing it to the gloom after masturbation. To Kazem, a boy shoved off into manhood, sex with Jatupon was an innocuous pleasure like some marijuana or a brief roller coaster ride but the gloom was of being a puppet of wanton desire for something that was far from his ultimate wish. And gloom for a man of little self-respect was deleterious. It was fine for the brain to forfeit logical restraint for that relaxation of fleeting pleasure that couldn’t be sustained or for one to use whatever was before him, but someday he wanted a wife as much as he now wanted to think that he was living up to his ideal of the fraternal benefactor. He didn’t want his whole life obsessed by the inconsequential pleasures of his night sports.

Kazem disheveled Jatupon’s hair with his fingers and slapped him on the head.

“Where the hell were you all day, you bum?” he asked. “You thought we’d start work again so you took off.” He laughed and sat down on the sole wooden chair that was the furniture of the apartment.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Jatupon said.

“I bought you both some clothes. I don’t know if any of it will fit since neither one of you came with me. Also, I had to see a movie all by myself. Suthep could have had some type of a tom yam tasting popcorn. They called it Mexican.”

“Why didn’t you get a girlfriend and bring her with you? Isn’t that what they are supposed to do: go with you shopping and to movies?” Jatupon sneered.

Kazem felt an icy sword in his heart. “I wish I could take these clothes back. Neither of you deserve anything.”

“Why don’t you get a girlfriend and leave me the hell alone,” continued Jatupon as he turned over on his side and glared at him.

Kazem lit a cigarette, smoked, and blew it into his brother’s face. “Because you love it too much.” He paused. “You’re right about me getting a girlfriend. I should get a nice Chinawoman like your brother Kumpee and then run off with her leaving the two of you to eat worms from the sidewalk. What a good idea, Jatuporn.”

Jatupon turned away from him and feigned sleep.

Sometimes he hated all of them—they who had made a funny vulgarity of his name; Kazem, the creator of the nickname, who solved his stress by physically accosting him; Kumpee who always flayed and flouted him at every chance; and Suthep who treated him with the blades of indifference (the worst of all weapons). He vehemently hated them sometimes and yet—

He imagined the mosquito speaking to him. “And yet you’ll gain the antibodies of hard, fortified indifference from the illness of hate. It isn’t so bad. It is a practical emotion that has been demonized as of late by Buddhist and Christian practitioners although thoroughly embraced by the Jewish, Moslem, and Hindu world. I’d think it over carefully before exorcizing myself of it. It is just one more darkly pragmatic aspect of life as needed imperatively as microorganisms are needed to lunch on the deceased.”

“I don’t want dark things. I don’t want to hate them. Tell me what to do so that I won’t hate them.”

“Hmm...You are such an idealist. Well, Suthep couldn’t care less about you except when he cares to sting you with not caring but he is the one who taught you to play football and takraw, and although Kazem violates you repugnantly in painful tactile thrashings much worse than Kumpee’s socks and sneakers ever did to your olfactory nerves he is the one who saved you from drowning and being beaten to a pulp by your father. Also he probably does genuinely care about family despite his bombastic proclamations of now being the eldest brother. He is the one who stifled the sadistic belittling of you that would have pulverized your self-esteem to dust had the father and eldest son been left to inveigh against you incessantly. When you are financially free and independent you can kill off all three of them from the present and remember the children they were. Then, you won’t hate them any longer. Maybe then you will even feel love but you will have to kill them off first.”

If only good things beget good things and bad things beget bad things then, thought Jatupon, there would be divine order. Then, the invisible presence of God or the forces that be would not matter. Dead or bored as God might be, still the laws of the land would have been laid out like that of a deceased founder of a company. The principles of Buddhism would be in place and operative. But such was not the case. Kazem was not a devil and he, Jatupon, was not a saint. He loved having Kazem’s tongue enter his anus prior to his entrance. This “priming up” was a pleasure that he was addicted to have. Wasn’t his resentment of his brother this evening more from the fact that such pleasure had not been given to him throughout the day? Wouldn’t it have been lovely if he had been made into a sexual slave 24 hours a day, totally free from logic? Somehow, he felt that the mosquito would agree on this point.

The politician, judging aptly that a deposit of 20,000 baht would be like asking a pack of dogs to put the chicken in the refrigerator, had one of his aides escort the boys to Chatochok Market which had almost everything for their business (woks, burners, gas canisters, ice coolers, utensils, glass vegetable shelves, carts, oil, noodles, cabbages, bean sprouts, tomatoes, meat, cucumbers, and rice). It was one of the world’s largest outdoor markets and Thais always gloated that everything in the world could be obtained there. The purchases were made in double since the senator believed that they needed more than one joint livelihood and a hungry pack with meager resources forced into the same struggle for sustenance would foster acrimony. He hadn’t exactly thought that they would be jumping onto the same prey viciously. He didn’t really have many thoughts about it. He hadn’t given this issue, or them, much thought apart from how to best unite and part benevolently within the space of a week if not sooner. This was just his assessment of males in general. He saw males in action on a daily basis in their debates on various bills. These were rich men and yet their lust for sinking their teeth into prey was great.

He did care up to a point. He felt that he had aggrieved them by not attending their parents’ funeral. He hadn’t wanted the discomfort that his ex-wife would feel standing beside him again. Being human, he hadn’t wanted it for himself. It would have made him feel uncomfortable and more out of place being there. It hadn’t occurred to him, then, that she wouldn’t attend. Furthermore, from what little he believed in Kazem’s answers to his questions, he felt that he should have protected these three from having their parents’ assets sucked up into some unrevealed bank account. They had been clinging onto the idea that ultimately Kumpee would act the part of the oldest brother. They had watched him go away without accountability and did this with hardly a whimper. The senator could have taken it upon himself to hire an auctioneer and then could have put the money into his own account. He would have given out the money when wisely warranted. He hadn’t acted responsibly and he regretted it.

Jatupon stood by, inert and despondent, as these purchases so abstract and foreign to his hopes were loaded off onto a mover’s truck. Despite his wish to survive being fulfilled, it was the aristocratic life he yearned for. Only leisure was life. A laborer was just movement and reflexes. A laborer did not run barefoot through the weeds and allow the smells to be one with him, transfer the beauty to a complex style on canvas when the beauty passed through his complicated mind, or attempt to understand why the pollen attacked him like a sickness. He wanted someone to grant him the honors of placing him in an orange robe, which he felt he was entitled to have—that special robe not of monks but of the type that surely belonged to aristocrats. He wanted leisure to see the rhapsody of every small movement under the lambency of both sun and moon. He wanted to meditate on coruscating city life as the Buddha of Bangkok. He wanted to be free of the noodles that were winding about him tightly and to grasp the leisure that should be his and no doubt was his in an earlier life. Poverty ravaged the mind in desperate acts—the mind ached in one continual groan for something within or without that might be sold. No appreciation of the present moment could be had in such a state. He wanted to know the splendor of the veins of each distinct leaf towering over him. Still it had been determined by the powers that be that he would float between the businesses of the two brothers who would have their separate livelihoods in different parts of the city.

Still, there was something to be gained in being so lost from memory and he was inured to being forgotten. The baby of the family that he was, he had been pulled out of a cranky woman tired of having children and responsibilities. Nursed and taken care of like any child, still as the years passed he often felt guilty for being his mother’s burden and his attempt at being his mother’s little helper did not engender her appreciation. Forgotten again this time, he would nonetheless be the instrument that fused the two carts into a family business and he could get along with both all right, he supposed. He didn’t think that his brothers were so different than himself: like him, they would work hard and feel themselves, at times, strangled in noodles. Suthep would be seeking an alternative being in video games, snookers, Thai boxing matches, and movement; and Kazem would seek his being through sickening carnal releases on his brother the result of an imagination that could make Jatupon into one rapturous whore or another, and a propensity to always take things apart, beat on them, and put them back together. For Jatupon, his escape came in his ride of feeling in love (tame as it was for new love), comic heroes that pulled him into more noble pursuits, and dreams of an aristocratic life.

There was a garbled mass of half-remembered faces that gnarled Nawin’s thoughts when he woke up one morning. No different than noodle workers toward customers buoying in their brains at the end of the night, he had to let these myriad faces-most of whom he had encountered in high school and at the universities he had attended -to gradually subside into forgetfulness. He sat up in bed and rubbed his forehead. His mind felt like one whose shoes were trapped in the coils of fallen barbed wire. He looked at Porn, this woman with whom he had mentally signed a contract to serve her needs and she his. Her hair billowed against her pillow like feathers. He thought to himself that she, being a prostitute, and he actually establishing a relationship with one, were so different from all other human beings. Maybe they were surviving hominids. They were definitely a divergent species of animal.

He thought about Songkran Festivals. All of his grandparents were deceased early into his boyhood. In his family there was no tradition of each relative taking bowls of water and cleansing the hands of the older family members and this tradition of offering good luck for the New Year, respect, and deference had never really embedded itself into his mind as a moral duty. He had never been Thai. Circumstances had made him into a hominid. He wondered pityingly about the circumstances that had maimed and freed her. He stared at her face with great pain and pathos. Tears weltered in the corners of his eyes. He did not know what to do with this feeling so he buried it and made love to her.

She took him in her mouth. The quicker and deeper she went the more pleasurable it was. Little did he care if she choked on it. When he was ready to ejaculate he pressed her head so that he could penetrate more deeply. His body had its cellular knowledge that a quick thrusting and a deep penetration would be more pleasurably exciting and the excitement and especially the depth of the penis in the vaginal opening would cause the male to ejaculate more semen that had a greater chance of impregnating a female. Such was the primitive making. When his savage frenzy had ended he knew the extent of his own selfishness and was relieved to be exorcized of it. He felt a humane sensitivity descend on him. He knew that of all the selfish and negative energies that influenced his thoughts, they were, for the most part, not him. With the exception of times of sexual frenzy, he was able to find a deep and benign part of his nature and knew it to be the true Nawin, the artist who drew the oppressed and had sensitivity to the pains of others, the one who wanted to enrich Porn and all he knew intimately in truth and beauty.

Perpetually the same, those of leisure yearned each year for the halting of time and, in dissatisfaction gained from comparing themselves to others more youthful, yearned for a return to earlier times of higher pleasures. But it was the laboring classes who continued to labor in insentience without reflection. They cooked their rice and noodles ceaselessly. They clung to their jobs like tiny, sedentary, clinging salamanders to windows during a storm. They found their beings (their minds and the feelings that would be refined into thought within them) lost to the reflexes of the day. Months blew away like empty bags skidding on the pavements. Evanescent and mutable to their ultimate end, their lives passed by blandly in dizzying headaches caused by the sun of the weatherless country during the dry season. When the rainy season set in there was the discomfort of leaking and wind-swept canopies, the lack of customers, and being drenched by the rain; but these issues were minimized by the fact that varied weather made each of the days more memorable. The brothers, transplanted into Bangkok with a livelihood, continued on as if in Ayutthaya. Memory of the uncle’s unfulfilled promise of a dinner had worn away like the memory of their parents or the abandonment of Kumpee.

At first Suthep strutted around in his independence like a dominant rooster but as the months went by the independence underwent the metamorphosis to loneliness and by 1 a.m. of each early morning, an hour or two after Jatupon would leave him, Suthep would often feel the chill of adulthood. One late night/early morning as the smoke of charbroiled fish and the steam of rice, noodles, and pork soup rose up the sweat-profuseness of his face and into his hairnet, he watched a girl giggle and slurp up her noodles with her boyfriend. He imagined all traffic on the streets and sidewalk gone and that there was just the three of them. He imagined those customers leaving unhappily. Then, as they were beginning to walk together, there was a dispute that intensified to the point where he attacked her. He imagined him dragging her by the hair, slapping her down, and denuding her. Suthep imagined himself walking over toward them and watching their canine copulation for a period of minutes. Then an idea possessed him and he started up his motorcycle and circled the couple, eventually chasing off the body that had been forcing itself into her. He imagined himself helping the trembling body of the female dress. He didn’t want to cover her but he did it to comfort her so as to gain her confidence to obtain a new round of banging that would involve himself and would last longer than if he were to force another encounter on her now. Pleasures that had the potential of being perpetual were always the best. He imagined that he learned about her life with contrived sensitivity and with time secured himself as the being whom she yearned for.

Then the happy couple was again a reality and he was standing alone in front of his cart. There they were at the table slurping their noodles joyfully. Adulthood was the maturity to relinquish the rebellion against society for relegating one to his petty station in life bereft of the pleasures he sees around him. Being wise was realizing that most of such pleasures were neither good nor beneficial. Although Suthep was an adult, he was a bitter man and he bit his lip in the thought of all the pleasures that were out there waiting for so many others and not for him. He resented being such a lowly clod. After the couple paid for the meal and left he sat at their empty table and looked out across the cars that veered near a discoth�que until at last he fell asleep. For a moment or two of REM he dreamed of his youngest brother dangling by some friend from an open window of an appliance warehouse only to have his shoe slip off in the friend’s hand and the body unwillingly succumbing to gravity with his force tripping off the alarm. But unlike what really happened two years ago to Jatupon and a teenager once they extricated themselves and arrived in the big city on a bus, he, Suthep, was the friend and when the shoe slipped off he laughed and ran. He woke up, shook off his sleep, and then began washing his dishes in big plastic bowls. He felt a loneliness eat up on him. Each evening it seemed to be exacerbated.

The next evening he was struggling in ambivalence on continuing to work or closing early. Feeling forlorn and lonely, and yet needing to talk to Kazem about a decision he had made, he chose the latter. And when he arrived near Kazem’s cart with a hairnet still on his head Kazem’s countenance was at first chiding.

“You couldn’t have lost your shirt already,” he said.

Suthep took off his shirt, wadded it into a ball, and threw it at Kazem. Kazem wadded it up and threw it back. Soon the three, in hairnets, were Thai boxing and laughing with each other. The few customers they had were ignored. It was dereliction of responsibility. It was a hiatus. It was bantering. It was enjoyment of each other. It was a bit of love followed by the sharing of duties.

On that fine evening of gentility Jatupon was able to leave earlier than usual. While the other two brothers washed dishes, wheeled away the cart to a parking lot, chained it up to a fence, and took supplies they couldn’t lock up into and under the cart back to the apartment, Jatupon went to Sanam Luang. Once there, he walked on the long cobbled oval track; interweaved aimlessly around trees and pedestrians; and watched the wind animate a bag with absolute breath and power. The wild, breathing plastic, reminded him of being—the putative lightning that struck the ocean and caused the crystallization of elements.

Six adroit teenagers playing a game of takraw were in a crescent position like the broken face of the moon. They hit a bamboo ball back and forth with their feet and heads in a motion that depicted continuum. Perhaps they needed to believe in the continuum of action and being (the random balls of matter that they were). Inside the stadium-shaped park were homeless families lying on their thin sheets of rectangular bamboo mats and towels. Above the center of this football field of dust he saw a few prolonged kite flyers and their instruments swishing as mad serpents of the open night skies under gas lamps.

He felt the lifelessness and perfunctory movements of being a noodle worker further exorcized from him and became enriched in the freedom of his own impulses. Still, he told himself that even though he was almost as poor and homeless as those strewn about him, he should not be out here to be possibly robbed. It was an inherent defense because, more than fearing robbery, he knew that he would most likely do anything for money. Also there was a secondary voice of a cruel conscience that taunted him for being such easily sold goods even though he had never really put himself up for sale and had never been bought. As American as he wanted to be, in Thailand (even Sanam Luang in Bangkok) there was little chance of being robbed or murdered. He realized that he wasn’t really worried on that score.

He was the same as the visual images of street life that had come to him earlier that day: dogs that gnawed through the trash; a man whom he had seen in the middle of the afternoon holding a tree of hooks attached to small plastic sandwich bags where water and goldfish dangled within (how his child cried particularly for the sake of the fish); strangers pushing against each other in the mad rush to sell something and improve the lot of their lives; and a blind man who had screamed a song into a microphone to gain the one baht coins he was begging for. Like them, he would do almost anything for survival and the gaining of a better life that would shake in the pockets of his pants. Life was rained on one like rocks thrown at the emaciated dogs as they scavenged for their food or listlessly lay in the center of congested sidewalks.

Like those homeless individuals on their mats, he wanted someone to look into his eyes and confirm his humanity. He wanted to hear a voice in the solitude of the night that would give him hope that life was not entirely random and that he had an importance. He wanted to believe in illusions. He wanted to believe that the incidents that happened in one’s life were for a good reason and that they were the iron scaffolding that built up his life into one monumental edifice which would go on and on. And yet if his family didn’t care to deceive him into seeing connections and connectedness in random events and time, no stranger out there would be benevolent enough to attempt the task. He was a rotting organism there to be trodden on like any insect. He sat on a bench and reread the earlier part of his Laotian poem: the queens’ prayers; the youngest queen’s pregnancy; the oldest queen’s plot foiled by reality stranger than the plot; the birth of the bird; the exile; the growth as a boy in the shape of a bird; the growing independent striving of the boy-bird and the longer flights away from home; the princess who saw the bird and wanted it...

“Who are you?” asked a girl who was around his age. Jatupon felt nonplused. Beauty and truth were extracted from him. He was forced out of himself and his reading like a boy who stared at the light so long that when he walked away from it he fell into a ditch. Stupefied, he did not say anything to the dark skinned glasses-girl. “I’m Noppawan Piggy,” she continued. “What are you reading?”

“A poem. It is from Laos.”

“Are you Laotian?”

“Not really. I don’t know what I am.”

“Why wouldn’t you know who you are? If you were born here from a Thai mother or father you are Thai and if you weren’t you are a foreigner. I can’t think of anything simpler. By the way, your grammar is awful. It’s ‘who I am.’ Not ‘what I am.’ Maybe you are Laotian”

“Well, I do. I do know who I am. Maybe I’m just wishing to not know.”

“And you are reading poetry to not know?”

“Yes..I...I know its different,” he said with diffidence, “but I’m wanting that.”

“You are wanting to become a different person by reading poetry or poetry will make you someone different? Maybe you are wanting to be different than other people”

“All of the above. Why is your name Noppawan Piggy?” he asked.

“It is a nickname.”

“Noppawan isn’t really a nickname, is it?”

“No, Piggy is. I got that from watching too much of the Muppets and Sesame Street when I was a girl.” She laughed.

“People don’t have last names as nicknames-only their first names.”

“Well this person does.”

“Why?”

“Why not? I don’t like my last name.”

“Well, it has to be the same name as your parents.”

“Now you understand why my last name is a nickname. It would be rather dumb to have two nicknames.”

“I can’t see that I understand at all. And no, I’m not Laotian; and my Thai grammar is impeccable. I’m not stupid. I am a self-taught individual.”

“Good for you,” she said. “They are the best kind.”

He slapped the park bench with his hand and moved to a corner so that she could sit down. She sat there. “So explain your reason for the last name as the nickname.”

“I thought I did. Well, I’ve chosen to make the last name a nickname because it is my decision to do so; and foremost, I want to be divorced from my parents.”

“Children can’t get divorced from their parents, can they?”

“Watch me. “

He chortled. “You are so honest. Most Thais aren’t that way. Sometimes they act like servants and sycophants and then talk behind those people’s backs. Sometimes they are scared to say anything at all like about the kings or anyone higher. You say everything openly even though you don’t even know me. I’m beginning to think you are the one who is not Thai. I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“I’m one of a kind,” she said. “I’ve never met a poor boy with an educated head sitting on a park bench before.”

“I’m one of a kind,” he said.

“I like people who read something different and imagine something different. I hate people who read comic books and play video games all of the time or buy lots of things from the malls each day, don’t you?” There was no answer. He had trouble denouncing these items that seemed to him so alluring although already his rash flood of feelings prematurely told him that she was the best thing that had happened to him while living in Bangkok and he didn’t want to destroy an emerging friendship with honesty. After all, at present he had no friends. “Aren’t you going to ask why I’m out here?”

He couldn’t let it be shown that he was feeling scared to speak for fear of saying something that would make her turn away from him. He didn’t realize that his vulnerability could be read from his countenance and the sweat that was beginning to come from his forehead.

“Well, why are you out here so late? Are you a homeless orphan?”

She laughed. “Listen, funny guy, see the pendant on this 14 carrot gold necklace.”

“Yes, I do. Maybe you should take that off. It would be safer. Put it in your pocket.”

“Oh,” she said diffidently. She took off the necklace and stuffed it into a pocket. “Thank you,” she said. She paused and then went on.

“I have parents and they are very rich. I live in a nice home. I’m just running away from it. I’m running away from them. You have a kind face but you should wash it more often. I see a pimple.”

“So. I’ve got oily skin. It doesn’t mean I don’t wash it. Now it’s my turn to give a question to you. Your parents did something that upset you. You are running. From what?”

“I wish I could slip into your poem.”

“It can’t happen but if you read it you can let the poem slip over you. That’s better really because that way you don’t slip away at all but just put on some modern armor. It is like feeling invincible—like slipping on a soldier’s uniform and strapping on a new gun.”

“I like that idea. That is beautiful. What’s the book about?”

“How a prince born as a hawk changed into a man through love and atonement. I’ve read it before. Here.” He gave her the book although he hadn’t completed the poem itself but only the preface.

“You won’t read it again?”

“No.” He lied. He wanted her to like him. He wanted to give her something so that she would remember him.

“Did you know that my father owns three factories and is a high official in the government?”

“How would I know that? I just met you.” He felt that it was strange that someone so dark should have parents who were entrepreneurs and high government officials. He also felt that it was strange that she should think that he would know her so deeply. Still, their conversation seemed to him so uniquely intimate like long established friends. “Here’s a pen and the book. I want you to write your name and address on the front cover.”

“Okay.” He took her pen and wrote it there. She took back the book.

“Jatupon Biadklang. No email address?” she asked. He didn’t understand much about such things. He just said “No” and shrugged it off as if it lacked importance. In his heart, however, he wanted to ask her questions about this technological age.

Then the girl said goodbye and went away. He did not understand this needy feeling suddenly brewing within him that yearned for the presence of another to stitch his open wounds. He wanted her to come back to him and he waited there on that bench for an additional hour with that one thought dominant in his mind and a foolish expectation that she would come back to converse with him further even though neither of them really knew the other. Still, when he eventually left, he felt hope in something within his disappointment that she hadn’t returned. He wasn’t quite sure what the nature of this hopefulness was. Like lightning flashing once to which the unaccustomed eye blinks twice it pierced darkness and restored faith in forces beyond mortal knowledge. Like the refracting rays of the sun coruscating at 5:00 onto the Chao Phrya River in round wild and random organisms of light before motor-gondolas and barges, so he felt that something brief but beautiful had happened to him and that the residue of it would always stay with him.

Born in boredom and anguish at seeing snow fall while doing her dishes in front of the kitchen window, delivered meals, disposable plates, and throw-away silverware of plastic came into being. They had seemed at first to her the perfect tools to minimize discontent. Then she kept the drapes shut at all times to keep from seeing the snow. Still it did not help; and one evening she beat on his locked studio door and screamed to it that she was going to her language class. She hadn’t been there but once following her enrollment.

While she went out with the snow and the wind, Nawin still remained locked away but free in his colors. They flowed in tight brushstrokes of an earthy tone. They were of French-Canadian mannequins performing their perfunctory duties of marriage. A summary setting of a banquet table was under the window. A profuse ochre sunlight poured through the window permeating the scene at the wedding banquet. The table cast a shadow that inundated around the feet of the mannequins like a pool providing the scene with form and volume. However, greatness was in the details and that he was still lacking. He was listening to Thai news from his computer. The anchorman said that Moslems and Hindus were burning houses in one Indian community. Hindus were throwing Moslem children into bonfires, telling them they would meet their deceased fathers. His pastel colors began to have a fiery gray bleakness. He felt great despair. He wondered why in the 3 million years of Australopithecus through the 100,000 years of his species (if his species was to some degree related to Australopithecus) humans had not learned love. They had learned speech and social skills for society to exist but they hadn’t learned love. He wondered if this word was totally empty without substance. Maybe it was a make-believe word to make humans feel better about themselves. He wondered if there was anything outside of human selfishness.

He had once gotten out of noodles—Noodles stirred in a wok or alive, like worms, in a vat. Briefly, he had gotten out of his boyhood assignments of washing bowls in tubs, being the seamstress attaching jasmine flowers into rosaries from a long, thick needle, selling them on the streets in the traffic, and then returning to wash more bowls. There was a time when his aunt had had mercy on him and had come into his life despite the inauspicious marriage that her sister had made. It almost seemed like a dream. Hadn’t she first enrolled him in a Bible School class? Within that class so long ago, from a lost being of himself, had he not taken a paper image of Christ and varnished it onto a piece of wood? Then his aunt let him dabble in education and gain the full thirst on the new taste buds. Neurological responses burgeoned and bifurcated within him. Now this wooden, shiny-faced Christ or the ashes of it were somewhere in a colossal garbage heap with so much Kumpee had coerced them to throw away or sell “to have as savings.” That image of Christ or the conceptualization of it in his head had not spared either himself or it from the trash heap. He was, nonetheless, fond of it. Strangely, Bible school for him had been the initial stage of his education at the temple school. He wished that he had that plaque to keep forever. If he were to have that plaque now it might be precious proof that a young scholar had actually lived.

This part of him was undeniably gone. Gone it was, for he continually slid out of his skin so fully and naturally even though he was rarely cognizant that this continual sliding away from himself was taking place. He was just slumbering as all slumbered. This was life, and unlike a movie, music did not accompany it’s plotless plodding of time. The sliding out of his skin happened every minute of his life and yet there was perhaps some consistency one might isolate as a Jatupon if one were to imagine such a being when Buddhism stipulated that the self was nothing but a delusion. Whenever he saw an emaciated dog wadded into itself like crumbled trash or sprawled out onto the pavement as if dead he would always say, “poor baby dog.” It was a long embedded sensitivity that he had developed in Ayuttaya from early boyhood. In Bangkok where they seemed even more pathetic, the sensitivity was exacerbated and he repeated this phrase over and over again no different than when he was six years old. This was surely proof of a bit of a consistent self. Friends always went away after they learned, shared, or enjoyed the company of a given person for they needed to evolve to the next level and forget previous levels. However, one surely did not lose himself completely. He did not know.

Still he was changing and within the darkness that was subjugating him into doziness a new embedded consistency was formulating. His mind kept flitting back to the thought of this girl, Noppawan, and his imaginative curiosity invented a mansion where she no doubt resided. He could imagine her governess and feel how contained and alone she might be within a rigid schedule of private teachers and tutors. He imagined her accompanied by servants while her continually busy parents remained remote and detached from her life.

He was as happy to be returning to his sordid smelling cell as that time when he had returned from the fair. With hairnet as a tail in his back pocket, his eyes gleamed of hope, and curiosity brewed about Noppawan. Change also marked the life of Suthep, who was sitting on two bags of his clothes, latent with the night, when Jatupon approached the apartment building.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Suthep was smoking near a tree.

“I got an apartment. I’m about ready to leave. I thought I’d tell you goodbye but maybe get you to help me with a bag if you don’t mind.”

“You’re leaving?” He felt nonplused. His senses tingled and throbbed in confusion like the onslaught of the mosquito when drugs had conjured illusions and excavated buried, opaque truths. “If you want to leave us, why were we all working together earlier today?”

“For old time’s sake. I’m not leaving completely—just from time to time when I’m tired and want to be able to sleep without having to come all the way back here.”

“What does Kazem say about this?”

“What he says doesn’t matter. What does it matter what he says?”

“I guess none but I want to know.”

Suthep paused. He wasn’t accustomed to confessions in the confessionals of tree branches. He sighed and spoke with begrudging reluctance. “ I’ve explained this to him for months. He has told me many times that he wants me to stay here. He always gets angry whenever I talk about it. Now I’ve stopped talking and am doing it, aren’t I? No, he does not want anything to interfere with his notion of what big brothers ought to do. He acts like he is a lot older than I am. Anyhow, he is obnoxious: always dropping by my business when he can’t catch me here pretending to be concerned that I might need something. Most of those times he was just trying to persuade me that we need some type of joint savings.” He coughed a deep chronic continuum that shook his body. He was of an average build but seemed to Jatupon as gaunt and sickly at such moments. “I laugh at his face each time he does that. I’ve been there, done that. Kumpee made us saps enough.”

“After Mother and Father’s death we were stunned.”

“Maybe. Maybe or just believing that only bad things would happen which is probably about right. Anyhow, I’m more or less gone. You both should be thankful to be rid of me so that you can carry on without being witnessed.” He laughed. “Go ahead and look innocent and confused.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“About looking innocent and confused?” asked Suthep in a chuckle. He also wanted to keep the conversation murky.

“About any of it.”

“Good, stay that way. None of us want to know anything-least of all me. Here, you can help me by taking a bag.” As Jatupon reached for a bag he uncorked his flatulent gas.

“How disgusting! Are you going to fart all the way up there?”

“Where is your apartment?” asked Jatupon, anxious that the subject be changed.

“You need to have a doctor check you out with all that farting you do” said Suthep. He was enjoying Jatupon’s embarrassment. “A fart doctor,” he said. They both laughed. They began walking down the soi to the main street. Suthep smoked and coughed. His face cringed and then he spat out some mucus in front of a 7-11. He buried it with the sole of his sandal. They began walking again. Jatupon was feeling even more reluctant to experience change and this reluctance spoke to him in the scraping shuffle of their talking sandals. Jatupon did not know what his brother knew and his mouth opened a couple times as if wanting to ask him. Still, he could not speak such things.

“How much is your rent?” he asked at last as the two of them waited for a period of minutes for a bus. He was anxious to wedge them out of the coffins that buried each of them separately into themselves.

Only words and actions were his crowbar.

“Just a thousand” Suthep grumbled. But from there the journey was a wordless void.

Before they arrived at the smaller cell Suthep bought a couple cartons of beer from a convenience store and the two of them sank into themselves within the barren room. Exhaustion stung them and yet both, wishing to find a chamber of themselves not mandated by work and sleep, let the liquor and marijuana smoke toss about their beings—beings that were sprawled on pillows on the tileless wooden floor.

Suthep stared at him so directly for a period of seconds with a face that looked like his aunt when she had peered out at him from her glasses. His stare seemed incessant and those eyes burned his face that blushed from the worry of what the stare and the invitation to visit here all meant. His aunt’s stare through her glasses had long ago been like a version of the sanphraphun, the dollhouse of the spirits that was often placed in front of businesses and residences. At such sanphraphuns Thais put down plates of food and lit incense that would carry to the gods their wishes. She had been his guardian spirit in a sanphraphun of those glasses and yet she had abandoned him. Like the aunt, Suthep’s eyes were probing. In the smoke of the cannabis he too seemed like a spirit. Suthep’s gaze attempted to measure the traces of manhood that were in the youngest brother. They attempted to not be repulsed by the boy, the victim, that still surfaced. Suthep noticed that even in the masculine activity of beer drinking Jatupon sipped the beer in little suctions like the infant to its bottle.

“Go ahead, little man, swallow as much as you can in one gulp.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“I’m not so little. We’re nearly the same age and I’m taller than you.”

“Age and height don’t make one big. It is experience, and you are lacking experience.”

“Lacking experience in what?”

“In what? In everything. In women, in outlook, whatever. You’re a child.”

“And you dragged me here to tell me that?”

“I didn’t drag you. You are making yourself the victim again.” Suthep chuckled. Jatupon avowed the truth of this with a smile.

“You make it sound like Mother and Father defended me as the baby boy” he half joked.

“Well, Kazem took up that role when we were out to beat you senseless.”

“Don’t you ever want to return?”

“Return where?” Jatupon swallowed in larger sips while his head was like a boat swiftly churning its propellers but going nowhere.

“To what we were. Like when we were able to finally afford a restaurant and Mom would come with Kumpee in the taxi and they would slide sacks and boxes of vegetables, rice, and pork that we would put away enthusiastically; or when we ordered a plastic ball from box tops of cereal boxes like the one that we spent months getting...the spacey one with many suction cups...it would stick to about anything when wet; that one Sonkran where we were in the back of a pickup truck with a barrel of water for ammunition, aiming at every moving target. Father had rented a truck to pick up something. I don’t remember what. But then, for some reason, he changed his mind and took us...” They both sank into their father’s rare episodes of kindness and then their minds switched to the pure fun of Songkran chaos where society became freer and fragmented to thoughtless instinctual responses of guerrilla warfare where aiming guns for the open windows of busses and targeting other rival gangs had no consequences.

“I am a man now. I don’t want to hear bullshit about returning back. What good does it do to be sentimental, anyhow? Chance took them and if they are looking down on us it will be with as little concern as when they were alive. As I see it, whether we honor their jars of ashes at the temple or spit on them it doesn’t much matter. Their spirits didn’t keep Kumpee from running off with what he could. Do I want to return back? Back wasn’t any good either; so, no, not really if I were to be honest about it.” Only the high he was experiencing allowed him to be so honest.

Anxieties began to wreak Jatupon’s sensitivities. The rag of a drape hanging against the window in a knot looked like a gigantic condom. There was a huge hole in the wall symbolic of life being a void. His brother was a person whom he was beginning to know well at one moment and a stranger with a strange face reminiscent of an aunt, dreamed or real, the next moment. He thought how odd it was that the whole perspective of someone he had known his whole life was interchanging so randomly with the worst moments being when his brother seemed to have a stone alien countenance.

He let another golden wave hit his tongue. It was like being hit by a wave from an ocean all bitter and suffocating. He began to laugh. He couldn’t help it. Pains and pleasures seemed to him as such an irrelevant and comical absurdity slapping a person around in its inundations. One moment he would be here and happy and then he would be there and miserable. He drank more of the beer and laughed.

“Chug it all down!” repeated his brother.

He thought to himself that here they were—two very young men who had once run freely together through puddles on the streets and yet despite their history (regardless of it not being a particularly close relationship) Suthep and all that should seem him was tenuous and frothy when it should be solid in his memory. Staring at him for a couple seconds, somehow he couldn’t believe that someone who said “Chug it all down” was his benefactor. He looked down. As he did so, he sensed that the bubbles were increasing in his can of beer. The mosquito, that had been folded, spread out its large mass once it climbed out of the beer can.

“I don’t want to be lectured to by you,” said Jatupon in his mind to the mosquito. “I might want an education but not some garbled ideas of an insect created by my own inebriated brain.”

“You get what you pay for. These opportunities of hearing me on my soapbox is as much truth as any noodle worker will be exposed to.”

“I know you are horrible but I don’t mind it anymore. I’m not scared of it anymore. I’m used to it. If I can’t get rid of you, at least you will no longer upset me.”

“So quickly you people acclimate and adapt to rough ways. How have you been?”

He felt stunned. How good it was to hear those words. “Okay.”

“Is the job going okay?”

“It is the same old thing.”

“Don’t you feel proud being there enslaved to the needs of higher classes than yourselves-especially when they are rather lowly to come to you to begin with? All of these department store workers and so forth.”

“It’s all right. I don’t know any better. I want to know why you like blood.”

“A bold childish inquisitiveness without considering order or propriety. You really aren’t afraid. You are getting bolder by the day in a more childish way. Why do you like chocolate?”

“I don’t know. I just do.”

“But why do you think that you like it so much?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You can guess if you follow your instincts. If you follow your instincts they will take you into prehistory when the sweet taste buds formed for succulent bone marrow. Which came first: the taste buds for what was sweet or the experience tearing into bone marrow? For the answer to that question you don’t need a PHD. You just need to follow your instincts and they will let you know everything.”

“I guess people in the past were often desperate for nutrients and found that they could survive by eating bone marrow. Nature began to instill man with a taste for that which was sweet so that he would more likely eat bone marrow when in a desperate situation.”

“Excellent. In answer to your question, maybe the boredom of flying around this rocky planet causes us to need to bite into something deeper. Anyhow, I came to find out how you were doing financially now that you have employment”

“We don’t need to worry about staying alive.”

“What more can you expect from life than that?”

“Jatupon!” There was a pause. “Jatupon!”

“A le nah? (what is it?).

“You are fading off completely,” said Suthep with a grimace. “I think you need to get the hell out of here. Your lover’s waiting for you. Thanks for helping me bring some of this junk.”