Corpus of a Siam Mosquito | Page 6

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