Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

Excerpt

Chapter 1

They, with their driver, went down Ramkhamhaeng Road singularly in the scope of their thoughts but conditioned into repudiating their aloneness. It was an early Bangkok morning with a new day tripping over the corpse of the earlier one the way dogs on the Bangkok sidewalks were walked on. It was early in the relationship of the two passengers and this nascent association contained the complex and awkward ambiguity of not being clearly professional or personal and he and his prostitute-model were tripping into each other. When she put her hand on his leg he would stiffen and both his legs would slightly slant away from her but when she removed her hand and kept it away from him for some minutes he would put it back there closer than ever to his thighs. Even he had to admit his actions made no sense given the fact that he flaunted her, and others like her, wherever he went; but it was part of the game of being desired. Although he wasn't even conscious that such a game was being played, she was fully cognizant of these subliminal calculative moves and how a woman was played. She knew that she was desiring him more as a consequence. She also knew that being desired required adhering to the rules of withdrawing from the neediness of wanting to be linked to a man and of transforming herself into the metamorphoses of self-contained fantasies that he would desire.

Despite Thai's reverence for royalty, the three of them went down Ramkhamhaeng Road without even thinking about the king behind the name. He, his whore, and perhaps the faceless one at the steering wheel as well, thought of themselves as a unit albeit an insignificant one. They had that sociable tendency to chat at each other to reduce the drone of one's solitary and melancholic thoughts but it was less the case with the pensive passenger, Nawin (formerly Jatupon) who, Aristotelian and poised as a Garuda, was a surly contemplative despite lordly debauchery. Through being whirled in vicissitudes he felt that he could withstand anything fate had to offer. Unlike the others, he did not need to escape his thoughts as much as a bull from a corral. Instead, he befriended his morose tendencies. Basking in the grandeur of his new stature, the back seat Nawin was dwelling on himself continually in the concern that his fame, isolated as it was, had not happened totally from the merit of his work. He wondered how much the licentiousness of his life and the salaciousness of the subject matter were the real color of what could be marginal talents. He wondered if he should change his subject matter proving himself as an artist even if it reduced the virility he felt as a type of swarthy Thai sex symbol. How strange it was, he thought to himself, that despite the fact that being dark was never an attractive trait in Thailand where the lighter, Chinese skinned Thais were thought to have more material success, sensuality, and beauty, he who was not particularly handsome from being dark as a shoe's heel should be sexy from his wanton disposition....