Corpus of a Siam Mosquito | Page 9

had come upon him as inconspicuously as the gait of the monk's orange robe in the subtle movements that philosopher made during their time of mourning.
Carrying suitcases and bags with his brothers and a woman of Chinese complexion, he sensed the rapacious discord of Bangkok-- virulent and paralyzing as ennui for the rich and servitude for the poor--and so he lagged behind them. There had been a time that he would have sniffed at this new city like one of the myriad crazed but gently starving dogs (after all, in certain areas of the streets, pheromones and urinary molecules dominated over the odors of car exhausts) but, as he guessed, Bangkok was always more tempting from afar. Even though he had repined for a more promised land he did not expect that even if he were to live somewhere in "Euro-American Bangkok" (Banglampool, Silom, and Sukumvit roads with their seven day a week travelers check cashing windows) his life would be any different than his situation at present; nor would it be any worse than his life in Ayutthaya unless he were to starve.
Still, he felt apprehension; and like a restive boy he slowly dragged his suitcases. He imagined remote Hill Tribe villages on the sidewalks and himself taking his suitcases through the bedrooms of naked girls as if, like one of the kings of the Chakri dynasty with his many wives, he were to declare to them "Honeys, I'm home." The dreaminess belied a gloom. If Jatupon were to think of one positive trait about himself that late afternoon he might have thought that the ejaculation of his semen, which he conducted alone, disgorged extremely far-- so far he had sunk into a shaky gray within himself that he couldn't see outside of any void unless it had a rope attached to it. Even the fetid air intimidated him. He felt intellectually obtuse. He was like a dog carried by an owner (a woman in a skirt, riding side saddle on a motorcycle) that squealed its head off when the motorcycle skid and floundered onto one side.
Staring down as his brothers, his owners, pulled the invisible leash, he knew that they condemned him, the laggard; and nominally, that condemnation made him feel compelled to look down more often than what he would have done otherwise. Still, when they crossed over to another sidewalk bustling with pedestrians he was forced to look up since he was inadvertently bowling his suitcases against the pins of strangers. In so doing, he noticed a store windowsill besieged by an orderly society of ants. He was beginning to acknowledge that Buddhist principles were curtailed by reality: a few ants allowed to live with a human became a hundred easily; multiplying mosquitoes brought disease and pain, and that one's immune system killed bacteria, viruses, and protozoa because murder was stamped into the natural order that no human will could bypass. And yet this demonstrated that the Earth, herself, was alive and full of creative potential. It was this mesmerizing dynamism that most lured his eyes.
The city was fetid as his older brother's shoes in the back of his girl friend's car (the car that had brought them here); and yet its billboards and tall buildings were opulent. He imagined them glazed in morbidly saffron or vermilion dust the color of a monk's robe and the color of blood and death. All the pedestrians were individually and rapaciously galvanized but banging against each other less systematically than the ants. They were ebullient like the bouncing of hair on a schoolgirl's back since most of them were shoppers.
The brothers and the Chinese Thai woman passed another street. Near it was the edge of a small park with one blended shadow of the fronds of palm trees spread out among a patch of grass and providing a visual respite from traffic exhaust and pavement that seemed to define the city. Here he was slithering about like a snake acclimating to both a foreign environment and the alien skin that he was now wearing. These three weeks had made him unreal. His parents had ridden in the car alone; there was the car accident; then a cremation and the selling of property; the drive from Ayutthaya; the night at someone's house in some type of a fever or hallucination; mosquito bites under a net; and himself turning into some type of caricature in a comic book or cartoon.
Whereas many other boys had books and knowledge he had his comics. He didn't know anything about the techniques of art although he had thumbed through some pictures from a book at a library in Ayutthaya. He had never even been exposed to algebra or other intellectual exercises that brought one in touch (so to speak) with abstract realities. He had heard