Quin?s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  Geraty, flat on his back, hiccupped. He licked his lips and rubbed the blood off his nose. He tried to raise himself on an elbow.

  Quin spat on him.

  Say it, you slobbering fat man. Say it.

  No.

  No what?

  Nothing.

  What do you mean, nothing?

  I’m sorry, nephew. I’m sorry about that.

  You’re damn right you’re sorry. You’re the sorriest bag of secret shit I’ve ever seen.

  No, that’s not it, nephew. You don’t understand. I’m not sorry that way, I’m sorry you can’t have an answer. I’m sorry your questions don’t make any sense.

  What the hell, you must have something to say for yourself.

  No.

  Nothing?

  Nothing.

  What do you mean, nothing? Nothing at all? Just nothing? You live sixty-five years and you’re noplace? You’ve got nothing to say? Not a damn thing?

  No.

  Why the fuck not?

  Because a toad and a uterus have the same shape. It’s too early now, but when you’re a little older take a look at the skin on the back of your hands. Take a look at the pan of gray water after you wash your hair.

  What are you trying to say, buffalo?

  I’ll tell you. First I have something to give you.

  Geraty groaned. He pulled in his arms and legs, struggled to get to his feet. A moment later he was lumbering into the house and returning with a black bowler hat. He handed it to Quin, who spun around and scaled it out over the sea. The hat rose on a gust of wind, stopped, slipped down the cliff to the waves with a swarm of seagulls chasing it. Quin rocked back and forth nodding to himself.

  Sit down, ordered Geraty.

  What?

  I said sit down.

  Quin sat down. His hand hurt. He was still shaking, but what bothered him most was that Geraty had remained so calm. His uncle jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  That’s a fishing village.

  I know what the hell it is.

  You do, do you? Then you know O-bon. You know Nichiren.

  Quin said nothing.

  What? Do you?

  No.

  You mean you didn’t learn everything there was to know in that Bronx bar of yours? Well, listen to me then. Fishing nets are spread and mended, storms and tides come and go. That’s the way it is here most of the year, that’s all people think about because that’s all they have to think about. But once a year it’s different. In midsummer there’s a day known as O-bon, the Festival of the Dead, a time of the moon when ghosts come back to the world they knew. The villagers welcome them with rice and sake, they rejoice, for the ghosts are lost friends and relatives. They talk together, reminisce, the day passes. All goes well until nightfall and then not a light shows in the village. Why? Because the ghosts are in that darkness. They’re there and they want to stay there. They don’t want to leave.

  The villagers gather on the shore. The young men raise the shrine on their backs and carry it out into the water. The old men launch small paper boats and set them afire, set them adrift so they can carry away the restless memories.

  The shrine begins to shake violently. The spirits have turned away from the flimsy craft they have been offered. They would rather linger in the village, in the darkness of the homes they once knew as their own. Not willingly will they submit themselves again to the deep.

  In front of the shrine stands a man immersed in water to his chest, an intercessor who must face the sea and demand a domain for the living with a voice that can overcome the dirge of ten thousand suffering souls. This voice must be stronger than the wails of the dead, louder than the wind, more insistent than the wishes of all the ghosts ever known to the men and women of this village. He must find that voice and speak with it, and when he does it must prevail.

  Geraty spread wide his arms. He fixed his gaze on a seagull suspended in the air. A powerful, monotonous chant rose from the terrace, an unintelligible Buddhist incantation that steadily gathered in force and rhythm. The pines creaked, the breakers hummed. Abruptly the chant ended and the seagull broke free on the wind.

  Geraty dropped his arms to his sides.

  What is done is undone, he whispered. The shrine no longer trembles on the backs of the young men. The burning boats cast adrift by the old men float away on the dark waters. The dead sleep, the living set their sails and fish their seas. The dangerous rite is over.

  And Nichiren? An unknown monk who lived in the thirteenth century. Who lived alone and unnoticed in a corner of these islands at a time when a Prince of princes ruled in Asia, a Prince of all the tribes, a warrior horseman so fearless and unbending his was the will of the desert itself.

  One day the Prince surveyed his empire and decided these few small islands off the coast of Asia should be conquered, not because they would enrich him but for the sake of the symmetry of his maps.

  So Kublai Khan commanded that a fleet be built, a fleet to carry one hundred thousand of his finest horsemen. Who but a man of the desert would build the greatest fleet in history for the sake of symmetry?

  In Japan there is no hope of combating the army of the largest empire the world has ever known. The Emperor retires to compose a poem, his Generals polish their swords and dictate love letters. Rice dealers bury gold, peasants give birth and die, ladies sigh over their wardrobes.

  A nameless monk tirelessly trudges the dusty road toward the south, toward the shore where the unconquerable Khan’s horsemen will begin their conquest.

  The afternoon comes when the fleet appears on the horizon. Briefly the Japanese forces group and regroup before scattering. The Generals honorably commit suicide. The Emperor observes sunset from his temple in the mountains. Fires and looting break out in the capital. The shoreline is deserted. For many miles inland the countryside is deserted.

  Except for one man, one figure toiling through the last light of day. It is well after dark before he reaches the beach, before he stumbles across the sands and sits down by the water, the first time he has rested in many days. But now he does not rest. He lays his hands in his lap and bows his head, a small man invisible in the gloom facing a forest of masts.

  In the deep of night a wind comes. The ships tug at their anchors and the wind shapes itself, grows in fury and in nightmare until it becomes the intolerable world given birth by one man’s mind.

  In the morning the sky is clear, the horizon empty. Once more the sea is a desert. A divine wind, a kamikaze, has destroyed utterly the magnificent fleet of Kublai Khan and all his magnificent horsemen.

  Years later Nichiren’s disciples ask him how they can ever explain such a miracle. They will not believe us, say the disciples.

  No, they will not, answers Nichiren, but you must tell them the truth all the same. You must say that once a man dreamed a wind would come, he dreamed it and willed it, and because he did the wind came.

  Winter, said Geraty. Last winter, perhaps?

  The man in question is no longer young. In fact he’s old, he’s tired. He has bad habits and he’s poor. In the course of sixty-five years of lying and cheating and stealing he has accrued only two things of value, both gifts from the dragon. One is a small gold cross. The other is a collection of rare manuscripts in translation.

  The cross was taken from a woman who was falling under its weight. That was in Shanghai before the war.

  The collection of manuscripts he found in the Chinese wing of the warehouse where the Kempeitai kept its files. One night he organized a convoy of trucks to carry the manuscripts away for safekeeping, then he set fire to the wing. That was in Tokyo right after the war.

  Let twenty years go by. Let them simply pass.

  It is winter. Last winter or one like it. Our man puts two bottles of Irish whiskey in a valise and takes the train to Kamakura. He walks to a certain beach and sits down on the sand.

  Why? To remember an evening long ago when he shared two bottles of Irish whiskey with a forgotten
No actor? To recall the four people who once held a picnic on this beach?

  Perhaps. In any case he sits down on the sand and opens the first bottle.

  An hour goes by, or two hours, or less than an hour. Our man is watching the waves and takes no notice of time. From somewhere in the darkness a stranger appears and sits down. He accepts a drink, mutters, stares vacantly at the stars. After a while he begins to talk.

  He mentions mulberry trees, pine groves, giant steps that lead nowhere, blackjacks and urinal candy, a face eaten by a dog, mushrooms, a night in Nanking.

  Our man listens to this phantasmagoria and is appalled. For He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. Must the chaos of the world be infinite? Is this voice from the, waves recounting a history of the twentieth century? The thirteenth century? A century that lies a million years in the past?

  The stranger is a tiny man. Is it the movement of his hands? His eyes? The way he holds his head?

  For some reason our man is reminded of the little woman in Shanghai. He thinks of her, and all at once he knows this little man and that little woman are related. Why? How? There’s no explanation, no way to comprehend it. They are, that’s all.

  The stranger drinks, he talks, he stares at the stars. Just before dawn he falls asleep, naked except for a towel over his loins. It seems that as he talked he felt compelled to take off his clothes. Our man quietly gets to his feet and leaves, but not empty-handed. No, he takes the stranger’s greatcoat with him because he has made a decision. Two decisions.

  First, he will take the collection of manuscripts to America and sell them for a large amount of money so that he can live his last days in peace.

  Second, he will return the small gold cross to its rightful owner.

  Both actions are for the same purpose. He wants to assure himself that the insane tale told by the stranger on the beach won’t end the way it began. He wants to prove to himself that even an account of history as grotesque as that can have some small measure of order behind it. Above all he wants to believe there has been some meaning in the pathetic parade of events and people he calls his life.

  He acts. He goes to America and the collection is confiscated. It’s taken away from him but those who take it, who store it in a New York warehouse, don’t realize what they have is useless. Useless because he has kept the key, the code book to the annotations, the dragon’s secret, the keys to the kingdom.

  Failure? No, total disaster. He’s sick and old and there’s no way he can support himself now. He came to New York thinking he was a rich man, rich at the end of life, but the rich He hath sent empty away.

  Our man collapses in a hostel for vagrant alcoholics. Three days later he staggers north to return the small gold cross to its rightful owner. The day he arrives back in New York happens to be the feast day of the saint for whom his mother is named, Brigid. He goes back to the neighborhood where he grew up. He staggers into the bar once owned by and named for his father, another Eddy, like all bartenders a profane confessor. After rolling the dice he boards a freighter and returns to Japan. In his pocket is the secret code book, all he has left.

  Summer.

  A summer evening. Last summer or one like it. Drunk, dazed from horseradish, our man finds himself lying on his back in a vacant lot in Tokyo, in a slum, on sand that is damp because he has come to rest in a gigantic urinal along with other scavenging alcoholics. The men in the urinal are dying, they’re all dying, and before the night is over they’ll be robbed of all they have. What else can he do but sleep and forget? He sleeps.

  Sleeps and snores and raves, for of course he can’t forget yet, the time hasn’t come, he must sink lower still. While he sleeps fitfully a horde of faces hovers over him, crowds around him in the urinal. All the experiences he has known in forty years in the Orient come back to him.

  In his dream he begins to visit these people, apparently to renew old friendships and share a mild anecdote or two in order to recall the nostalgia of other days, actually to beg something from them that will keep him alive.

  For now it’s come down to that. He has no excuse for living anymore. Either he finds an excuse or he’s finished.

  He makes a list and starts at the top of the list. That night and every night over the summer he lies on the damp sand of the urinal working his way down the list of names and faces. When he meets one of these people he smiles pleasantly. He nods at their eccentricities, ingratiates himself in whatever manner seems appropriate, apologizes, agrees enthusiastically with everything they have ever done.

  He flatters them, admires them, mentions their goodness and their strength, their tenderness, their humility. He invokes the saints in praise of them. He grins. He wrings his hands hopefully.

  Thinking it might amuse them, he shuffles his feet in a little dance. He asks for pity, begs for it.

  He gets down on his knees and cries, sobs, admits to all acts real and imagined. He takes off his clothes and displays himself naked so they will see he is hiding nothing. He covers his face with his hands and peeks between the fingers.

  Ridiculous. Is anyone going to be fooled by this absurd performance?

  Of course not. There’s no chance of it and he knows it, but he does it anyway because his pride is gone. Gone. He’s desperate to find an excuse for living.

  He snatches up the articles they discard. No matter how worthless they are, he snatches them up and presses them to his chest, clutches them, squeezes them with his thumbs, licks them, wets them with his tears, buries them in his greatcoat.

  A greatcoat stuffed with the debris of life.

  There’s a glass paperweight meant to resemble jade, a forged Canadian passport and two forged Belgian passports, a screw-top jar, the Litany of the Saints, a battered movie projector, a secret-bag, layers of sweaters, a cache of animal husbandry documentaries made during the early days of the Russian Revolution, a piece of red flannel tied with string, two bottles of Irish whiskey, a journey that goes south and west from Tokyo and pauses for a snooze in the mountains of the Philippines before returning to Tokyo, a spotlight, an exhibition, the depraved legacy locked behind the smile of the everyday man in kimono, a pushcart, steam rising from a pan of boiling turnips.

  Victorian horsehair chairs, cannons captured in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, a gentle smile, three gas masks, bamboo tubes, flowers of Tokyo, evaporating doorways, materializing cemeteries, midnight tombstones, dead cats, bartered rice, buggered pickles, an autograph, a vegetarian diet that excludes honey and eggs, a coat that buttons the wrong way, cracked No masks and torn No costumes, a piss in the moss, the kimono of the princess, a manuscript never begun, a complete index to the manuscript that therefore lists nothing, again two bottles of Irish whiskey, claws crushing the heads of rodents, turnips again, nothing but turnips for nearly a quarter of a century, a reign that lasts seven hundred years, a collapsed garden wall.

  A tea bowl turned three times, a game of Go, koto music, a wall of rotting Cossack horses, a glass eye, headaches, a ball of fluff, a container of ether, a houseboat in Shanghai, a monk, a mirror in a Mukden toilet, the third bottle of Irish whiskey, a fire in Nanking.

  A limp, a megaphone and whip and frock coat, again three gas masks, again a spotlight, a ring and a bed, the one-eyed tomb of Semarang and the sure-footed vine of Mindanao, plump shrimp tails, the highwire, little red swinging lights, sawdust, tubas, the shadowy juggler with his torches, the wastes of central Asia.

  A pool table, delicate fingers, a sudden laugh, again a ring and a bed, the highbar, the triple somersault.

  Cigars and computers and salad dressings, reports, mixed Mongolian grills, steel mills in Borneo, new governments in South America, massage parlors in Africa, bagels and smoked salmon, folding camp chairs, an endless procession of black limousines, a houseboat in Tokyo, pink gin, fogged glasses, neckties, haiku marching music, once more the megaphone and whip and frock coat.

  A tattoo of a dragon, sauce flavored with ambergris and phosphorite, the smal
l lamp of a battered movie projector, a photograph superimposed upon another, the fist of knowledge, oysters, laudanum, a pagoda deep in the ground, a mirror in a shrine high above the city.

  More oysters, another glass eye but this one from the Boston waterfront, a nurse with a hypodermic of water, a bus ticket good for thirty days’ travel in the United States, seagull soup, another glass paperweight, a life preserver, a jukebox with colored lights, jigglies, frozen tuna fish, a television set, a hunk of rotting meat, a beach by the sea.

  Movie magazines and epileptic fits, gloves and hairpieces and empty lipstick tubes, false sideburns and a false moustache, a chow mein whore, shoeboxes.

  Korean latrines, icy Manchurian cellars, familiar smells, a breakwater that leads to the dark waters of the bay.

  A shoemaker’s son at a shoemaker’s bench, Lapp proverbs and Malabar peppercorns, high hogs, a final three gas masks, a final transformation, love poems in all the languages of the world, a final bottle of iced vodka, a final jar of iced caviar, a final bath in the morning, a final erection at midnight.

  And another koto, another gentle smile, another hypodermic but this one for insulin, the Talmud in Japanese, a black spot in the garden.

  An end.

  The day finally comes when there are no names left on his list, no debris left in his life. He is empty, he has picked himself clean.

  He empties out the pockets of his greatcoat and finds only the dragon’s code book, his last possession, that small notebook wherein the alchemist Adzhar recorded the ultimate secrets of a treatise on love. When he has returned this to its rightful owner, as he did with the cross, he will be ready to die.