wondered what would be some other choices of jobs he could pursue to
break away from what was left of this fraternity and become an
independent being. The idea hurt him. He then told himself that he
never wanted to leave his brothers. He told himself that he would go
out to find Kumpee, the fetid one, if he only knew where in the big
city to search.
Jatupon saw his own pimpled face staring at him; his childhood
friends who moved or became people he could not relate to; and his
parents that no human sense of bonding, volition, or imagination could
bring back. Orphic memories gleamed and sparkled opaquely like the
moving shadows of leaves on the pavement. "So, I can not see my own
reflection without cringing. So, I felt that sense of fear that came
from thinking that my classmates might not want me to play takraw with
them and that feeling has not left me entirely. So, I'm scared of
losing people, like fumbling with the bamboo ball, as if their
departure would be the end of my own personal essence! So, in the end,
we all come down in a cruel fate." He could not formulate these
abstract thoughts. It all was a base and indistinct feeling. He was
attempting to channel the fears that constituted so much of his being
so that they would not burst into his consciousness.
"So, have you finished falling so fully and foolishly into
yourself," asked the mosquito. It paused and looked back at the girl.
"She is Chinatown skin, the kind every man pants for: all beautifully
white, each aesthetic non-deformity ranking her in the realm of
desirability in every Thai man's mind. 'Won't she, in this
quintessence of beauty, have virtually no chance of making a deformed
baby,' screams the man's ingrained DNA programming that composes each
and every cell. 'Won't she, in this quintessence of beauty, have
virtually no chance of making a deformed baby,' scream's the
psychological programming created by the influence of his peers who