Corpus of a Siam Mosquito | Page 5

(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