tools to ease the task of making a living, and later they were
sustenance and emotional pampering for the aging parents. Above the
steering wheel she showed to him a small rectangular box that she
opened like a coffin. In it was a large golden pen that gleamed like
the roofs of a Buddhist temple. Minutes passed. She continued to
exhibit the pen and her half-smile while staying encased. All of the
car windows were rolled up. He kept wondering what good the pen would
do him if it were just a visual appearance seen through the glass of a
car. He forgot the pen and concentrated on his mother who was as
intangible. He heard the sound of her calmly wrestling unsuccessfully
with a door handle that would not unlock.
He or it--this mordant mosquito-- came with wings piercing through
sleep. He again spoke of her, the girlfriend, as "Chinatown skin" and
drawing her from a deck of cards, the mosquito threw her. The card,
animated like an email greeting, clicked around as if on high heels.
The woman's form, detaching itself from the shell of the card, sang and
danced her dance. Jatupon and the mosquito both lusted for her. Jatupon
wanted to rush into the toilet the way he had seen a man in his early
twenties rush into the public restroom at the movie theatre, Major
Ciniplex in Ayuttaya, a week before his parents died. On that occasion,
or misadventure, Jatupon, who a minute later went to relieve himself in
an adjacent cubicle before going back to his cart of noodles, heard
pumping noises. Then on his side of the crack he faintly saw a shadow
of a hand stroking a penis on the tiles to the left of his feet. That
man had sought pleasure in marginal solitude; but for him, with a
mosquito staring him down with emotionless black eyes, there was no
privacy. His masturbatory time was limited by his hallucinations.
He tried to suffocate the thought of the Chinese Thai woman in an
imaginary pillowcase. He tried to extinguish the sparks of his own
desires by deluging them with more abstract and tenuous thoughts. He