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 of the Internet and assumed it was the brand name of a certain
computer but wished to know for sure. He knew that his poverty created
his ignorance and felt his ignorance made him stupid. For him there was
nothing but day to day living twisting about like a noodle fried in the
juice of itself under the hot Thailand sun.
There was a secondary trait about him that despite his bleakly
gray and vermilion self-deprecation he was pleased that he possessed.
His 14 years of life had provided him with at least enough acclimating