Corpus of a Siam Mosquito | Page 5

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