Steven David Justin Sills

“ He was sedentary in his own guilt for his attempt to murder Kazem, which later led to the best sexual experience he had ever had. Hate and the frenzy of love were rotting the best aspects of him that was so neatly named a soul. Hate and love had been horrible fulminations of neediness that ignited a person into another being, possessed will, and thrust reality into chaos. Sure this release of sexual tension, in the acme of ecstasy, led to Nirvana like any well thrust missile but each intimacy was like a cow that jumped over the moon. ”

“ Within life’s physical titillations in this sordid realm through the smell and feel of breath rhythmically sliding onto his nose from the spewing mouth of his mate —a warm soothing wind crossing the hill of his nose; the tactile wearing of another’s skin by touch more luxurious than any silk; merciful orgasmic clemency from logic; the moving of a chest; the heart beat; and yes, the feeling of being in love addictive and sensitive toward another human presence, one’s ideas of life were whitewashed and exhilarated. For him, sex in the shower had annulled his hatred of Kazem. ”

“ Would you visit me in Bangkok?” He spoke with such innocence that the mosquito had to smile bashfully and look away from the awkwardness of knowing that only a child believes that mother and father are extensions of his own body; only a child walks into the forest with a kind stranger where he is bound to a tree, raped and murdered; and only one warped in the wisdom gained in tragedy finds himself inseparably bound by every stern, euphonious truth uttered by a monster. ”

“ It was a grassy fringe that went behind the wall and gate that enclosed the actual park. The sprinkling of rain was falling onto him and he could smell the stink of his damp shirt as if the metamorphosis to manhood had made him into the fetid one. Behind the wall he heard the squeaking chains of empty swings being moved slowly in the wind. Cars that infrequently passed the park were unreal and eerie as descending ghosts. No sooner had he awakened than a middle-aged woman in a red jacket rode up beside him on her bicycle. “Fortune teller?” she asked.
“No,” said Jatupon. ”

“ He was Jatupon in his puddle of blood yearning for the love of the violator. If love was mixing oneself into someone like vodka and cola, he loved her. If it was a child crying over the loss of his favorite toy, he was feeling that. Should a Thai newspaper reporter get a look at him now, he thought, the nonchalant seducer of the souls of Patpong girls would seem to him as a fraud. The reporter would be disillusioned that this young man championed for his bit of hedonism had been an illusion. ”

“ Kazem looked onto this bludgeoned ugly little face reluctantly and Jatupon felt like a piggish or bovine woman whose acquaintance said, “We could never be more than friends, you know” and she—Yes, she could see. She could see—hadn’t she seen it before? Had she really dismissed those countless earlier smirks of repugnance aimed at her fat enervated face and her clumsy tense body both of which made her nothing. Mother nature made the being breed with the best of bodies to create a good physical specimen in the baby. ”

“ The elastic of his underwear had been encroached. He had been violated with those fingers. His body had been flipped over like a pancake. He had felt his face pushed in a puddle of his blood. Sitting on the floor, piercing him with his eyes, he wanted to purge this beast from his life. Then a few seconds later his next conscious assembly of understanding only made him want to vanish. He wanted so much of the impossible that second: for the substance of his own life to vaporize swiftly and meaninglessly and opposite of this, to kill the monster and resurrect his dwarfed manhood in his own eyes. ”

“ If you deny the human you will have wasted your life not living it at all. That is what will happen if you are lucky. If unlucky, I suppose you will eventually snap like a crazed immigration officer who begins to shoot tourists. You are an animal not that you have to be swallowed up whole into your hungers. The illusions of being in love, the ambitions that have allowed you to subdue the Earth under the illusion of gaining some happy plateau after making your conquests, are hardly instincts one can extract. ”

“ It was a CNN glimpse into the future: skyscrapers ablaze from passenger jets deliberately being slammed into them. They were being made aware of horrific ways of dying and since it was so horrific there was no self-centeredness and movement by which to callously disregard it. They were empathic and there was no escape. Jatupon wanted to shake the gods from their slumber, to knock the emerald Buddha from its pedestal, and to hijack fate and turn it around at gunpoint from the cockpit. He wanted all life to cease and start again in parity and respect. ”

“ He saw another one wring out a washcloth and clean another table. He could imagine her travail just as he understood the travail of those around him on overpasses: the emaciated elderly with cups in their hands seemed to cluster on and under every pedestrian overpass. To be homeless, he thought, would be more horrific than the moments at one’s death: a travail of being worthless and lost, where dangling blue from a rope inveigled the imagination that could not fathom a means to get 6000 baht and pull oneself off of a park bench. ”

“ And then her bedroom became a limb of a tree and there she was transforming into an adult female mosquito and he was becoming a male one. There they both were in complete maturity. He did his dance and he rubbed his legs so as to attract her with his sound. She was ceramic in her stiffness. Her skin was ochre like the dead bodies at the Siriaj Hospital museum sunk into their glass caskets of formaldehyde. Yet her eyes were lively even though they looked at him so askance and distant. She smiled with her closed insect lips. ”

“ He disparaged himself by casting that self as a cartoon of a motorcycle taxi driver sitting sidesaddle with a group waiting patiently in a queue for customers to arrive. Stationary with time passing amuck, and content with empty and drowsy space and flies buzzing about his face, his life defied money and motion. “Get out of the way. If you can’t fasten a doorknob take a broom and sweep up that mess in the back of the restaurant. I don’t know what you are going to do when you get older. You can’t even cook. You can’t do anything and even walking you trip over your own shadow,” said his father. ”

“ He wanted to meditate on coruscating city life as the Buddha of Bangkok. He wanted to be free of the noodles that were winding about him tightly and to grasp the leisure that should be his and no doubt was his in an earlier life. Poverty ravaged the mind in desperate acts—the mind ached in one continual groan for something within or without that might be sold. ”

“ It had materialized in action and now it had lethal consequences.
“Don’t play so hard, boys” said Kumpee. In Jatupon’s perspective the stink of his smoke-ridden clothes and the beer of his breath gave an acrid and fetid cloud which was miraculously saving him.
Kazem lowered his arms. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. He put the television on the floor relieved at having escaped the worst passion that can fulminate in a man and lose him in the deepest abyss of regret. Sweat poured from Kazem’s forehead and his face became a deep red in chagrin. ”

“ I am a woman lover. I don’t make war,” said Suthep. “Show me your eyes, Jatuporn.”
“Leave him alone,” said Kazem.
Kumpee grabbed Jatupon’s head, yanked off the glasses, and twisted the face so that Suthep could see it. “A regular raccoon, that one is.
“No, even a raccoon is lighter than that. Maybe it’s like watching a raccoon after he and a bear have been going at it: the bear with a television in his paws and the raccoon cowering near his puddle of blood. Thai boxing doesn’t get as exciting as what I saw. ”

“ There was the character of Jatupon: there were dark prodigious forces inside and outside that frame that were ineluctable. No celestial power would rectify his life by making family better than what it was or himself, the sordid bastard that loomed there, as hallowed and saintly as what he once believed monks to be. Nature begot freaks of the worst kind and so becoming a freak in the tossing of the passing years was understandable.
Jatupon’s ego was not turgid. ”

“ You sometimes dabble here and there with an encyclopedia in the library and then you forget everything you’ve read when you understand it at all,” said the mosquito in a contumelious air. “Only the dreamer is the illusion. Not the dream. The dreamer sinks back with the dirt.”
It tossed that card like a coin from its gangling talon tips. The card enlarged to a life-sized form and moved toward Jatupon. He almost felt seduced by it as it moved around him in its mating dance. ”

“ I see you emptying out puddle-remnants of the previous week’s water from your plastic buckets where we are laying our eggs and then pouring in new laundry soap and water. You attempt to flatten us with the palms of your hands. You never seem to consider death such a tragedy in those circumstances. I can’t see why any being—mosquito or human—would want to continue on for thousands of years anyway. A being continually growing from the same old bud in an environment not all that conducive to growth becomes as fallow as the world around him. ”

“ Strangely, the world was a dreamy place and from the modest display of fireworks being shot over the canal there was a dreamy idea of connectedness and fraternity in the psyches of these young men although such ideals varied from moment to moment based upon their interpretations of the environment. Lagging behind in serpentine movements of dreaminess but eager for connectedness, Jatupon hurriedly caught up to his brothers only to lag behind them again. ”

“ He saw all the suffering species from an aerial perspective for he was being carried around on the wings of the mordant mosquito that had scooped him up on its back. Buddha knew that tragedy abounded in recycled life but Jatupon could not figure out if Buddha tried to break the recycling of life like a coward who couldn’t endure pain or if he left his protective palace to understand the magnitude of human suffering for the masses. ”

“ We have a relationship but it’s a peculiar thing. It is one of those rare finds based on understanding and admiration. One great thing about you that I admire is that, despite your moral turpitude, I don’t have to worry that you will someday become a bitter old man who hates life. Bitter old men, Nawin, tend to be that way because they resent young men off having pleasures when they can’t engage in them any longer. You have your art, your permanent window on the world. You aren’t just wasting your life on the next thrill-I mean not completely. ”

“ Why did you get married? Why did you bring Porn here? Why am I and this boy with you now? What forces drive you?”
“Hunger.”
“Porn?”
“Hunger.”
“Noppawan?”
“Union.”
“Hunger again. Hunger for stability.”
“Okay, hunger again. Women are a turn on”
“Are they? And here you are with a boy, Jatupon.”
“The name’s Nawin,” he shouted. Then he calmed down and laughed at himself. “Yeah, it’s Jatupon; and you’re right, here I am with a boy.” He laughed again. “Variety is the spice of life. That is an American aphorism, Mosquito; and Nawin here is a full blooded American born in the states.” ”

“ The disappearances were ones Kazem attributed to Suthep chumming up with Kumpee to have a bit of money to play snookers. For hours and hours they were lost in the movements of traffic, the brown and Chinese faces, movements of strangers on the sidewalks, and the swirl of infinite numbers on the quest for money, happiness, and adventure. He read faces and movements from his spreading feelers. They too wanted money bestowed onto them to squander at will in all forms of self-indulgence. They too wanted to squelch their routines to live their dishonorable lives in the quest of sensuality. ”

“ Then the happy couple was again a reality and he was standing alone in front of his cart. There they were at the table slurping their noodles joyfully. Adulthood was the maturity to relinquish the rebellion against society for relegating one to his petty station in life bereft of the pleasures he sees around him. Being wise was realizing that most of such pleasures were neither good nor beneficial. Although Suthep was an adult, he was a bitter man and he bit his lip in the thought of all the pleasures that were out there waiting for so many others and not for him. ”

“ He wanted to hear a voice in the solitude of the night that would give him hope that life was not entirely random and that he had an importance. He wanted to believe in illusions. He wanted to believe that the incidents that happened in one’s life were for a good reason and that they were the iron scaffolding that built up his life into one monumental edifice which would go on and on. And yet if his family didn’t care to deceive him into seeing connections and connectedness in random events and time, no stranger out there would be benevolent enough to attempt the task. ”

“ To avoid hunger and thirst he took a cup he found in the trash and begged outside the park. He watched a blind old woman with a wooden attach� case of lottery tickets, a jasmine rosary salesman with merchandise looped around his arms like long bracelets who went from car to car, a woman at a table stringing them for her own sales (even the mendicants had to compete with each other to gain a mere sustenance) , sidewalk seamstresses with their antique foot pumped sewing machines, and a man with a bicycle-pulled ice-cream cart who stood there scooping out a dip for someone. ”

“ He looked out of the car window. The palm trees seemed like rock solid Cyclopes eating away the remnants of the sun. He noticed that the car was stopping. The gates opened to an acreage far from balloon peddlers, sandwich salesmen with a box strapped onto their chests, holy jasmine makers, goldfish in the bag mountebanks, car window newspaper accosters, and the sidewalk noodle workers.
“Will he be alone?” asked Suthep.
“His staff will be there,” said Kumpee.
“I mean women. An Old guy with lots of money must have new ones around each week. ”

“ Jatupon stood by, inert and despondent, as these purchases so abstract and foreign to his hopes were loaded off onto a mover’s truck. Despite his wish to survive being fulfilled, it was the aristocratic life he yearned for. Only leisure was life. A laborer was just movement and reflexes. A laborer did not run barefoot through the weeds and allow the smells to be one with him, transfer the beauty to a complex style on canvas when the beauty passed through his complicated mind, or attempt to understand why the pollen attacked him like a sickness. ”

“ He had become the rescuer of whores humanizing their sorry plight. Their only sins were to be born poor and to be loyal enough to not pull out of the loose fetters of family obligations. They continued to remember shadowy figments of obscure rural relatives whom they needed to feed. Still being a hero was burdening him with a singular motif and he continually shot this thought through his neurological circuitry until the taxi driver spoke, parting his thoughts like Moses and the Red Sea or Buddha sabotaging a bit of the recycle factory of the human soul. ”