Corpus of a Siam Mosquito | Page 9

medicine and so he could not fail to believe that it was
true since there was nothing to his knowledge to replace it with. The
present moment ravished and trashed all former beings and, like a
mountebank, sold its new products as the true goods. To Jatupon, the
youngest, there was a vermilion color to the day. It was no wonder. The
present 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