Corpus of a Siam Mosquito
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Steven Sills >> Corpus of a Siam Mosquito
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14 Copyright (C) 2002 by Steven Sills.
Corpus of a Siam Mosquito
--Steven Sills
"So he spoke, and the bright-eyed goddess, Athene, was pleased
that she was the god he prayed to before all the others. She
put strength in his shoulders and knees, and set in his heart
the daring of a mosquito, which, though constantly brushed away
from a man's skin, still insists on biting him for the pleasure
of human blood."
--The Iliad
Homer
Book I: Palaver
Chapter 1
They, with their driver, went down Ramkamhaeng Road singularly in
the scope of their thoughts but conditioned into repudiating their
aloneness. It was an early Bangkok morning with a new day tripping over
the corpse of the earlier one the way dogs on the Bangkok sidewalks
were walked on. It was early in the relationship of the two passengers
and this nascent association contained the complex and awkward
ambiguity of not being clearly professional or personal and he and his
prostitute-model were tripping into each other. When she put her hand
on his leg he would stiffen and both his legs would slightly slant away
from her but when she removed her hand and kept it away from him for
some minutes he would put it back there closer than ever to his thighs.
Even he had to admit his actions made no sense given the fact that he
flaunted her, and others like her, wherever he went; but it was part of
the game of being desired. Although he wasn't even conscious that such
a game was being played, she was fully cognizant of these subliminal
calculative moves and how a woman was played. She knew that she was
desiring him more as a consequence. She also knew that being desired
required adhering to the rules of withdrawing from the neediness of
wanting to be linked to a man and of transforming herself into the
metamorphoses of self-contained fantasies that he would desire.
Despite Thai's reverence for royalty, the three of them went down
Ramkamhaeng Road without even thinking about the king behind the name.
He, his whore, and perhaps the faceless one at the steering wheel as
well, thought of themselves as a unit albeit an insignificant one.
They had that sociable tendency to chat at each other to reduce the
drone of one's solitary and melancholic thoughts but it was less the
case with the pensive passenger, Nawin (formerly Jatupon) who,
Aristotelian and poised as a Garuda, was a surly contemplative despite
lordly debauchery. Through being whirled in vicissitudes he felt that
he could withstand anything fate had to offer. Unlike the others, he
did not need to escape his thoughts as much as a bull from a coral.
Instead, he befriended his morose tendencies.
Basking in the grandeur of his new stature, the back seat Nawin
was dwelling on himself continually in the concern that his fame,
isolated as it was, had not happened totally from the merit of his
work. He wondered how much the licentiousness of his life and the
salaciousness of the subject matter were the real color of what could
be marginal talents. He wondered if he should change his subject
matter proving himself as an artist even if it reduced the virility he
felt as a type of swarthy Thai sex symbol. How strange it was, he
thought to himself, that despite the fact that being dark was never an
attractive trait in Thailand where the lighter, Chinese skinned Thais
were thought to have more material success, sensuality, and beauty, he
who was not particularly handsome from being dark as a shoe's heel
should be sexy from his wanton disposition. Likewise, his thoughts
were dark in a land of frivolous irresponsibility. To Thai's the word
"serious" had a negative connotation and he was that. Unless one was a
monk, being contemplative was a tacit violation of laws in the Land of
Smiles. He had become the rescuer of whores humanizing their sorry
plight. Their only sins were to be born poor and to be loyal enough to
not pull out of the loose fetters of family obligations. They
continued to remember shadowy figments of obscure rural relatives whom
they needed to feed. Still being a hero was burdening him with a
singular motif and he continually shot this thought through his
neurological circuitry until the taxi driver spoke, parting his
thoughts like Moses and the Red Sea or Buddha sabotaging a bit of the
recycle factory of the human soul.
"My son flew into Changmai recently. I've been wondering about
airplanes ever since-just thinking about how things get off the ground.
Have you ever wondered that?"
"Ka," meaning yes, the woman in the backseat croaked like a crow.
"I'm trying not to question it. Wondering such things would make me
scared that they don't stay up in the sky," she laughed. Her name was
Jarunee but her nickname was Porn. "This will be my first plane ride
soaring off with the birds."
"Thais don't often fly," he said. His idea was tinged with a
bitter undertone as if poverty turned one's bones to lead and he found
that his idea put him back in the solitude of his thoughts for only
silence ensued. He decided to sound happier. "You sound excited."
"It has been my dream." She leaned her head against Nawin's
shoulder.
"Flew off to Changmai. He lost his job during the financial
meltdown of 96. 3000 baht. That's what the family lived on each month
for a good many years. Then she was pregnant and laid off from the
restaurant and they stayed with us for five or six months. Of course
they could have stayed longer. After all, they are family."
"Yes, of course. You sound like a good father. I'm sure it will
get better for everyone soon," responded Porn as she looked up at the
old face in the mirror hoping with softness to make the tenor of the
conversation gayer.
"Krap," he said meaning yes although he wasn't in agreement. "No,
he continually got more depressed and then no matter how many job
interviews he went on, he came up empty handed. Then she took their
children to her parents. He came up there a bit later. The in-laws had
him but didn't want him. He hadn't been trained at anything but working
in the factory. He didn't know how to plant rice or maybe he was too
depressed to learn. It wouldn't seem there would be much to learn. You
just put them into the ground. Anyhow, he was walking around in a daze
all that time. That's what she claimed they said about him. Soon he
returned with us but before we knew it off he went to Chaingmai. I
don't know why. I got a post card from there. It didn't say much
other than he had taken his first flight. Can you imagine just buying a
ticket, leaving, and not saying a word."
"Ka, not really. I can't imagine anybody doing that...unless he
just didn't want to worry you. Maybe he didn't want to worry you about
if the idea was right or wrong financially. I bet he has friends
there and they'll help him to locate work."
"Yes, it is the best thing. I've been going to the temple to give
food to the monks and blessings will follow. I'm sure of that. I've
never gone on a flight. Where are the two of you going?"
"To Montreal."
"Where's that?"
"To Canada. She smiled but the word, favorable as it was, didn't
have the flavor of Paris or cities in America."
"What will you do there?"
Nawin wondered what she would be doing there. She had escorted
him around galleries, parties, and auditoriums where he gave speeches.
Bangkok gossip columnists had sometimes even mentioned her presence
with him. What would she be doing in Montreal while he attended
post-graduate classes? That was a fundamental question he had no
answer for. He had granted unto her a new profession where she didn't
have to spread her legs to anyone but him. He had rescued her from
stripping and whoring in a bar in Patpong but perhaps that would not be
enough. Nobody was content. Like any animal, a human always yearned
for more. They were trying to build up on themselves so that they were
free of all discomfort. A woman was more that way than even a man
based on his judgments and to be left alone in an apartment in a
foreign country would be one major discomfort she would not tolerate.
He began to miss his wife: she didn't need anything--not even sex with
him. She was free to love other things than him--higher things and he
was free to love higher things than her as well as the lower things
like Porn. It was for this reason that he loved her but he didn't
desire her so much except as an intellectual companion. This one he
desired and that love certainly had more thrust than the former one.
At least it appeared to be stronger.
The sky had tubes of light paint oozing out into the darkness and
the sky could not ascertain if it wanted a moon or a sun in its
presence. The ride was just beginning and yet it was monotonous in the
darkness and the light of the street lamps that refracted glaringly.
The three of them still remained as little conscious of the moon or,
dependent on the limitation of their eyes, the corona of the moon, that
they happened to glimpse as accompanying them on their early morning
departure as they were of the monarch, Ramkamhang, that was the source
of the road's name. The taxi driver was near-sighted so to him, as most
things at a distance, the reality of it all was begotten as a blur.
The back-seated Nawin with the cigarette fuming and the legs
sprawled out and thumping to his portable CD player and his model or
whore with her hand again on one of his legs had their thoughts parted
once more in the kinetic movements of linguistic moans.
"What airline will you be flying out of?" asked the taxi driver.
Following patriarchal social etiquette he was addressing the man
instead of the girlfriend despite not liking the smoke. The man was
more than a customer but a member of the more affluent class and this
by Thai, although not Buddhist standards, was well revered. How swift
one's encroaching aloneness was purged and thwarted in the retreat
engineered by the batons and water cannons of one's linguistic moans.
The whore, whose self-image had been disparaged by the unconventional
positive endorsement of her activities by the wife, was grateful to
gain the parting of her thoughts from the driver's voice. She was
pleased to be once again hearing anything--even the least little
unenlightening fact-about their trip. She smiled. After all, it was
the land of smiles.
"Thai" mumbled Nawin's voice from the back seat.
"Domestic or international?" asked the taxi driver as if amnesia
had wiped away a whole section of memory. Porn released an alien
chortle that made Nawin think that he was sitting on the back seat with
some type of mythological, hybrid animal he was in the process of
taking on an overseas journey. How quickly she had gone from
seductress to a callow calf and kid. He smiled at the man's ignorance
without laughing. He felt that his girlfriend was ugly and noticed how
mutable the sight of anyone was: at one-time ugly and at another time
beautiful, at one-time virtuous and another point wicked, and at one
point victim and another time slut. It was not only the physical
dimensions that could vary from moment to moment. The perception of a
whole being could change. He moved himself to the window to get away
from her hand and feigned a curiosity with the world outside. He rolled
down the window. At that moment they both had a similar jejune feeling
of the repetition of old things and new things not fully connecting.
It was indescribable to them both. Porn kept asking herself if she was
doing the right thing in forsaking her responsibilities with her
clients for the unknown of traveling with him.
"You look like you are car sick," said the driver. "My son always
got that way even a kilometer down the road when he was a boy. Matter
of fact that happens to him now--not quite as bad, though. I can't
think how he survived the flight to Changmai. That I'll never know."
Nawin, to show proper deference to an older man and to prove to himself
that he wasn't churlish, looked toward the mirror and front windshield
and gave the whole frontal world a nod. The boy born of the name
Jatupon, was bleeding inside him. His brain waves wiggled around like
noodles. He was no better than this man. They both had been born poor
with limited opportunities. He couldn't laugh at him for any reason.
"Are you going international or domestic," asked the driver to the
twenty-five year old. Again there was a chortle. "Why does that
question seem to make her laugh," asked the taxi driver. "That is very
strange. That is a strange young lady."
"Krap," said Nawin gruffly, "I don't know why she is laughing."
"We are going international. Eva Airlines. Eva Airlines, an
international flight to Japan." Reiterated Nawin. He kept it simple.
He didn't even want to think about Montreal. The thought of
accompanying an animal, of sorts, to the other side of the world was
too much. No sooner had he said it than she reminded them both of the
fact that she would be going to her home first. Nawin had fallen into
his own pensive inclinations but unlike them he wanted the completion
of his thoughts. He was scanning his mutating neurological circuitry
for a possible answer to the enigma whom he called his wife.
Noppawan's flippant comment that the stoplight wouldn't get any greener
as she smiled and shut the door on him and his whore troubled or
inveigled him. One's driveway wasn't exactly equipped with a stoplight
so that one sentence bordered on sarcasm. Her placid demeanor was like
plastic and how she behaved belied everything so how was he to know if
she was discontent with this arrangement if not jealous of it.
It was the first time that he would be leaving her to travel
abroad. He had offered to delay the trip by a week or two until she
had submitted her grades at Assumption University, which Thais called
A-back. Maybe having his Porn stay over at their house the previous
night was disrespectful to his wife but nice or offensive behavior was
based upon one's guesswork on how society would interpret such
situations and unique situations like this were all the more impossible
to judge. His wife was definitely different. That was for sure; but
she was still a woman down deep even if she denied it just as his
American passport and name-change made him abstain from bits of
himself. A woman had instincts at suspecting a man's activities. A
woman had jealous rages and seductive lures that had a chance of
keeping a man with her: genetic programming from hundreds or thousands
of female ancestors who had experienced the promiscuity of husbands and
were afraid that they and their children would not be properly taken
care of. But there was certainly no chance of children. She slept with
him a few times as husband and wife in a motion of fulfilled and
completed consummation never to be repeated. Then she went in to get
herself sterilized. Why she needed to do both was unclear. She was a
mystery and steadfast in committing herself to that vow they had made
to each other when they were 14 or 15 years old to not live petty
lives. Such was the gray in the gray matter that enveloped them. Life
with Noppawan had the insatiability of an itch to a mosquito's bite and
contained the same pleasurable discomfort.
"Taking a trip to Japan" thought the taxi driver sarcastically.
He wasn't certain how anyone could afford to go there. He was stuck to
the boundaries of the car and he resented it; although from it, despite
its limitations, he was always introduced to people so different than
he was. They were the favored ones whose ideas were not curtailed to
traffic jams exacerbated by infuriatingly influential traffic lights
and accidents. Traffic accidents were such chaos because smashed cars
could not be moved until insurance agents came to the scene to make
their reports. Traffic policemen, who could easily be bribed, were
never to be trusted. The favored people did not have everyday to roam
the streets like homeless but highly mobile mendicants, their every
movement enslaved and dictated by the pronouncement of street names
called out from the back seat. "Do young people like you have money to
go off wherever you wish?" The words pierced out of one who was
pierced. The ache tore open like a tenuous newly heeled scar with the
blade coming up to slit others. He knew that he had behaved contrary
to social instinct but he hadn't been able to stop himself.
"Don't you know who this is?" asked the whore with arrogant
vehemence.
The taxi driver looked in the rear view mirror at the brown-faced
Nawin or Jatupon and asked, "No, should I know you?"
"No you shouldn't. Neither one of us should know the other one.
Just drive!" said Nawin although again he winced from his darker alter
ego that only became him when he uttered its thoughts. He wasn't
totally devoid of societal programming of right and wrong no matter
what he claimed to Noppawan. Being respectful to one's elders and
giving the prayerful gesture of the "wai" (pronounced as "why") to
one's superiors did exist in him at certain times. He would always
stand up for the tribute paid to the king prior to a movie although
that was more from the idea of not offending the sensibilities of
others around him or, less altruistically, getting himself possibly
thrown out of the movie theatre. Furthermore, the Jatupon who had
brought cups of ice to customers when he was a boy, the uneducated
slave who had found himself spun up in noodles of sidewalk restaurants
until he was 15, often began to stretch like a 26 year old fetus locked
up in a heavily fortified placenta. He would feel how disparaged
Jatupon often felt. He would feel guilt when he disparaged others that
seeped into his veins while ghosts of yesteryear suddenly vexed him
making him feel numb and cold inside.
He too wanted to stop thinking and he wished that his thoughts
could be intruded with conversation. "I just mean that I'm nobody
important. I paint a little. I'm going to Montreal for that reason."
The taxi driver was reticent. "Do you have many hours left driving
today?" Nawin asked him. Still there was no answer. He threw the
cigarette out of the opened window. "Do you want a stick of gum," he
asked the girl.
"I have a tick tack in my mouth now but I'll take your gum and save
it for later. You might not offer it again." She giggled and he
smiled at her with the tightness of his closed lips. She had lost her
animal, and there she was as his seductress. He kissed her and
returned the headphones over his ears. The savory taste of her mouth
was in him.
Chapter 2
The acceleration that took them out of Huamark and through
other adjacent sections of the city eventually led them to her area.
He did not remember the name of it: Bangkae, Bangplad, Bang-something.
He paid little attention to what his mistress said. Her voice often
seemed the strident spluttering of burning fuel in an engine that
couldn't produce motion. King Ramkamhaeng was a bygone entity. As soon
as his model picked up some of her things that she had forgotten to
bring with her the previous day and they had some breakfast, then
Thailand would be a thing of the past too. For how long he didn't
know. He was married but it was one signature on many sheets of paper.
The significance of spilled ink could not be read unless, like many
superstitious Thais, he were to seek a fortuneteller-mendicant sitting
on a sheet or straw mat on a sidewalk or in a park.
Noppawan had her chance to go with him. He had asked repeatedly.
He had tacitly exhorted (mostly with his eyes) but she had refused
him. Maybe she needed him to command her presence. Maybe in this
nebulousness of strong selfishness and altruism called a personal
relationship, so immediate and personal like finding oneself enveloped
in smoking and fiery dust, she needed constant reminders that he cared
about her more than any other entity selfishly and altruistically. That
would be the woman in her if there were such a woman.
He tried to contemplate what love was like for normal people. It
was surely a dust storm one invented in one's mind to escape loneliness
but then it became intertwined in more neediness and consciousness of
the other's feelings and thoughts so as not to be vanquished to
aloneness. An individual who was able to overcome the grief of the
loss of dopamine in the ephemeral and moribund high of being in love
would cling to his former pleasure-inducer as a source of meaning in
life's vicissitudes. He and Noppawan had done the same but they were
less like individuals finding themselves separately cast onto lifeboats
in an ocean of random waves for they found oceans of thoughts within
themselves that seemed more navigable to solid chunks of reality. They
needed each other less; or so he thought.
Thai women generally had obsequious crying bouts in their rafts,
but Noppawan, he argued, was not a woman. She was female without
womanity. She was a female who advocated overcoming petty human
existence for a love of ideals, compassion, and the attempts at
understanding the human predicament. He couldn't see into the future
to know if he would be returning to Thailand anytime soon to be peered
at through his wife's thick dark framed glasses. At present there were
only the wills of three individuals cowardly seeking meaning for
themselves in a unit. There were only these socialized wills rolling
along on a road in marginal darkness under the specious assumption that
there really was a destination. The sensory input of traditional Thai
music was coming to them from the front and back speakers of the car
that was their confinement. The radio music, no matter if interpreted
as harmonious or strident by the three individuals, was a levee helping
to block their pervasive inundation of self-absorbing, mordant thoughts
and reminded them (the patriot and the pending expatriates) of their
commonality as Thais.
They passed a mall where he and Porn had gone shopping a month
earlier. That day they had spent together there was the levity of the
stroll and the shiny flash of credit cards in this Thai way of
forgetting one's impoverished roots. Feeling on top of the world, he
comported the male gesture of having one arm clutching the other one
behind his back. It was a gesture of affluence in the stroll of the
shopper's quest. At least twice when he encountered friends of his
from Silpakorn Art University with bags in their hands he would talk to
them for a half hour and somewhere into the talk he used another male
gesture of affluence. He would slip a foot from a sandal and then slap
it onto the floor loud as a firecracker. The sandal would hit the
floor like a hand slapping against an impoverished peasant.
They stopped in an alley smaller than a side street called a
"soi." It was in between many Mom and Pop businesses and there, crowded
within, was her apartment. He knew rooms like this well. They were
rented out for fifteen or twenty dollars a month (600 or 700 baht),
barren, hot, and unventilated as an attic. When she had gone in to get
her bags he felt less lonely to be momentarily rid of her. Even now at
age 26 but with thoughts at certain moments suffering and dragging like
a man of 50, there was just himself, the real unit of one, and delude
himself all he pleased he knew that he could not find anyone more
significant than that. The only thing next to his heart, in the
pocket of his shirt, were the slides of his art depicting the naked and
dejected whores of Patpong that had ejaculated him into fame and puffed
up a latent ego in himself that thought that he was a higher being than
other Thais. He was keeping them there that day because he wanted to
momentarily hand them over to airport authorities so they would not be
harmed in airport security. When she returned with an added bag that
the taxi driver plunked into the trunk the two men smiled at her and
she smiled back. After all, Thailand was the land of smiles and every
infant understood the advantages of smiling. To bypass his surly
temperament and increase friendly relations, Nawin offered more breath
fresheners or chewing gum for everyone. No Thai would refuse such
friendly gestures and the two of them took from his hand greedily like
tamed birds. Then he began his old contemplation of why 2 was greater
than 1 or why 3 was greater than 2. It was an old argument of his
wife. The first time she posed it to him they both were 16 years old.
He had made the mistake of asking her to a dance. "Why do two things
coming in close proximity to each other have greater value?" she
asked. His only response had been "A le nah?" meaning "What did you
say?" Neither one of them went to the dance but straight to their
bedrooms and their sullen thoughts.
Porn was, according to his thinking, an "all right whore." She
didn't cause him any problems at all and it was for this reason that he
carried her along with him as a personification of his intellectual
decadence thereby increasing public intrigue with him. She was the
pretty doll he could swing about as a reminder of his one-man school of
art. He, Nawin Biadklang, could flaunt her around as the premier
example of the dark vision in his mind and the sexual slavery of his
nation all meshed together. He would have to draw a lot in Montreal
and sell everything he painted to pay for any expenses the scholarship
would not cover. She preferred her title of model. He was not so
heartless to deny her this euphemism. She successfully relieved him of
the tension of his body and to be emitted of it like a squeezed
tangerine in such a good rhythmic fingering would well compensate for
the stress level of having to spend so much time with her. He desired
her a lot of the time so by most accounts of love he did truly love
her. Foremost, Noppawan did not object to her. Matter of fact, she
wanted Porn to relieve him. She wanted him squeezed. She wanted the
pus squished from his brain without having to get dirty. She wanted to
continuously wear the glasses that caged her tepid orbs and to not
succumb them to rapturous non-Buddhist primal yearnings. She did not
care to dodge the aloneness of her thoughts through a rapturous
delusion that she was one partial being made whole in sex and love.
And yet by her account she did not want to mandate his awareness. It
was only by tripping on shadows and feeling vapid equanimity that came
after having absurdly given oneself over so entirely to the sensation
of pulling on one's genitalia that a man actually knew anything.
This whore was and was not his typical whorehouse girl. On the
day of their first meeting he had been sketching runners and trees at a
stadium near Assumption University where his wife taught. His head was
resting in a fog until she materialized. There she was casting a shadow
onto the sun that was sedating him and wrapping him into himself in
sleep. There she was questioning him on his art and pointing out her
mommy, a skinny and frail thing, sitting on the other set of bleachers.
He found out that she was a dancer. There was no surprise there. Her
flirtatious gestures and the presence of her frail mommy looking over
at them and hoping the purchase would take place were tacit but
undeniable clues that she was poor and wanted a male companion. That
was no surprise either. Yet beyond this calculated small talk or
artifice was an ingenuous mouth that glistened in guileless desire. She
was a money girl. That was obvious, and yet there was more. There was
infatuation and an accompanying mommy who was like an SOS. Porn was a
whore, but if he hadn't been married, she could have been more. Except
for Noppawan, who was a flagrant novelty, he couldn't quite decipher
how whores and wives were all that different. Both baited the man for
the fecundity of prosperity and progeny. It was a survival response
that was selfish in base primeval instincts. It was human and
beautiful. It was filled with womanity.
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