Mandragon

by R. M. Koster

  Mohotty sat cross-legged on his spike box. Palms pressed together under his chin. Staring at me, Then he dropped his hands to the frame of his box, raised his body, swung off to one side. He stepped down from his platform and crossed the horseshoe, pressed palms under his chin and bowed.

  “Now I will teach you if you wish.”

  I looked down at him, wrists crossed lightly at my chest. “I don’t want to learn. I want to let it use me as it pleases.”

  “You think that you are not responsible. You are wrong.”

  “I don’t do anything. It uses me. I don’t want to learn or understand.”

  Long gaze, then a faint smile. “As you wish.”

  Mohotty dipped his head, then walked away. It might have been better had I taken him as my master.

  The Rotunda opened again that evening on schedule. Despite general consternation and without Gili-Gili. He was strapped down in the prison ward of San Bruno Hospital, a sacrifice Don Lorenzo made to keep his circus open. Grushenka Látigo told her brother about the outrage to her person and her honor, and Captain Dmitri showed up with troops and a blanket arrest order. Don Lorenzo gave him Gili-Gili, who was still raving and unlikely to be performing for some time.

  “We’ve caught the culprit, sir, and you may have him. But surely you do not mean to deny the children of this cultured capital a spectacle at once delightful and educational. You must not judge us all by one Egyptian! Take him, my dear captain. Rid my troupe of him. You have my thanks. But let the show go on! As for the compensation due your esteemed sister, the rascal’s trailer ought to fetch a proper sum.”

  It never crossed Don Lorenzo’s mind that Gili-Gili might be innocent, not even when Mohotty told him so. It wouldn’t have concerned him anyway. The blame fit Gili-Gili nicely: he was unable to defend himself: what more was needed? How he’d managed to pack four dozen rats into his fez and sleeves was his own business. Illusionist’s trade secret. Why? was something the police could beat out of him if they wished. As for a mystic power working through a subhuman hermaphrodite, well, that was the sort of mumbo jumbo one might expect from a scrawny heathen nigger in a loincloth. Don Lorenzo wasn’t in the market for it. One maniac a day was quite enough. He roared Mohotty out of the converted bus where he lived and had his office, and otherwise contented himself with kicking Chancaca soundly in the stomach, with docking his barker two weeks’ pay and warning the rest of us that there would be, by God! no more foolishness. The show went on.

  The evening news had broadcast that a mad necromancer had been arrested at Amichevole’s circus. From the moment its flap opened the Rotunda was thronged with people expecting strange events. They weren’t disappointed. When Bruno the strong man lifted his globed show weight, it continued rising till it pulled him off his feet. When he dropped off, it zoomed straight up and tore out through the tent roof. Three times during the evening the air above the crowd became abruptly full of red and yellow parrots that swooped down then disappeared, and Mohotty flew around the horseshoe, riding his spike box like a magic carpet.

  Titana’s tattoos were animated. The face on her rump blew smoke rings. The soldiers on her back fired their flintlocks, thrust their bayonets, throttled and clubbed each other, bled and died, while the Liberators’ guns volleyed shot across her spine at the Spanish ranks. And the waves on her shoulders pitched so violently that half her audience was seasick.

  As soon as the Seal Girl began telling her stupid story, those listening found themselves before an igloo on a frozen waste. Saw the action played in pantomime, by the light of a sun that hung on the horizon, no brighter or more warming than a lamp bulb. Left the partitioned area sneezing and shivering, their faces blue, their fingers stiff with frostbite. The Sumatran Terror sat placidly in his cage, reciting the Apocalypse in Latin, while his jodhpur barker tore chickens apart, and bit their heads off. And when the Double-Sexed Miracle was ensconced for display, the pimp with the pointer and the trill in the white smock floated up on either side of me. In my same spread, reclining attitude, and her uniform and his trousers split in tatters, flew off over the curtain, along with her blotched panties and his shorts. The two of them hung in the air a full ten minutes, revolving slowly, their parts on show for the jeering rubes.

  Some people found the evening disturbing. Some fainted, some ran howling into the night. Some took to drink, and some swore off forever. But none complained that he’d been rooked. The general reaction was summed up by Lazarillo Agudo, writing the next morning in La Patria: he’d rather be dead than have missed it, and rather have three teeth pulled than go through it again. Another paper ran an eight column photo of the Rotunda on its front page. “YES IT HAS MIRACLES AND YES THEY ARE ASTOUNDING.” A popular disk jockey took calls all morning with opinions on how we’d worked the show. Super-thin black wires. Mass hypnotism. Smoke and mirrors. And the gringos in the Reservation put the circus off limits to military personnel. Small wonder more than a thousand people were waiting outside the Rotunda at noon next day. But the Rotunda wasn’t going to open. It was bewitched, the performers and barkers said, and they were on strike.

  Hard to blame them. They were more or less right. Spectators thought the craziness was part of the show, but the Rotunda people knew better. Demons and poltergeists, devils and imps. A few figured the source might be Chancaca. His chicken-chewing barker beat him unconscious, just in case. But the chief candidate was me. They would listen now to the roustabout’s tale of the tire, and Ruperto’s bit about getting a magical bum’s rush from Rebozo’s van. And reliable Ofideo had seen my half-naked barker take a swing at me and bloody his own nose. Ofideo wasn’t sure what he believed himself, but he endorsed the strike and took demands to Don Lorenzo. An exorcist for me, and the archbishop to purify the tent with prayers and sprinklings.

  Don Lorenzo was not sympathetic. He was beside himself with rage. He hadn’t been in the Rotunda and didn’t credit the reports of what had happened. Couldn’t. Lacked the imagination. Some oddities had taken place, what of it? As far as he was concerned, nothing that drew a crowd could be disturbing, much less evil. The only deviltry, the sole incomprehensible event, was that a pack of imbeciles were breaking the circus code and costing him money. He told Ofideo he’d deal with them later, and put all his energy to getting those who’d come for the sideshow into the main tent.

  The show went placidly through the parade, through the first acts. I didn’t go over till after the halfway point. Found a seat high in the stands, and soon as I sat down I felt the surge, felt it and waited. Zito had got his cats up on their stools and was about to make his bear ride the tricycle, when a look of bewilderment crossed his face. He toured the cage apologizing to lion and tigers, then gave his whip to the bear and climbed on the trice. Pedaled briskly round and round inside the stools, head ducked and shoulders hunched, while the bear flicked lightly at him and the audience roared glee, while the bear held up its forepaws and bowed stiffly. Still pedaling as though his life depended on it when Don Lorenzo, face chalky with fear, ordered the cage wheeled from the ring and directed the spectators’ attention to the spotlit perch above them, to the high wire and the Great Aristo.

  In a white cutaway, white spats, and white silk hat. Picture of elegance and poise, but as he stepped cut on the wire, his gravity began revolving. Trim and erect, but with every step his body swung to the right, till he was walking horizontal, till he was walking upside down! Then, at the center of the wire, directly above mutely shrieking Don Lorenzo, Aristo realized he was upside down and lost his balance. His gravity was reversed and so he “fell” upward. Thirty feet straight up to the tent roof, where he bounced as though on a net, and lay with his back against the canvas, staring horrified at the ground. Then he flipped over on his belly and scuttled upside down across the ceiling like a gigantic albino roach. He grabbed the nearest mast and clung there wailing, till a trapezist went up and tied a rope to his ankle, till three roustabouts hauled him down like a blimp. Would have tethered him to the grandsta
nd, but then his gravity re-reversed, returned to normal, and he collapsed in their arms.

  By then Don Lorenzo had called in Imelda, but after two circuits her horses developed the faculty of speech and began arguing over going clock- or counterclockwise. Stopped short, then turned in opposite directions, dumping Imelda to the sawdust. Went to opposite sides of the ring and took their cases to the public, flinging their heads back to bray obscenities at one another. And when Don Lorenzo shouted for the clowns, only whinnying came from his megaphone.

  It was at that moment, as he stood pawing the sawdust, neighing through the cardboard cone, that he caught sight of me. Saw him spot me, then saw myself through his eyes: head and shoulders wreathed in an orange aura, and my eyes glowing like live coals. There was an explosion without concussion, like the immensely amplified crack of a high-powered rifle. Where Don Lorenzo had been standing was an airport limousine, with an Intercontinental Airlines flight crew. And then I glimpsed Don Lorenzo in my mind, megaphone still at his mouth, three blocks away outside the portico of El Opulento.

  Later that afternoon he spoke with me. This was in the office part of his bus, while a tiny plastic fan beat petulantly at the soggy air, while a crowd of circus people waited outside in the tepid drizzle. His first impulse was to strangle me, but as he lunged his hands flew up to his own throat and squeezed till the impulse passed. Fell back into his chair, an aircraft pilot’s seat bolted to the floor. Sprawled gasping till his throat cleared.

  “Stop tormenting my circus” Forty-nine percent command, 51 percent plea.

  “It’s not me.” Slight figure in string-belted cotton trouser, shy brown face above rain-spotted T-shirt. “It’s a power inside me.”

  “Tell it to stop!”

  “I don’t control it.” Paused, then something came to me. “I think it doesn’t like the way I’m treated. It’s chosen me to live in, and I think that when I’m degraded it’s degraded too.”

  “Degraded? Did I hear you say degraded? You are a freak of nature, a monstrosity, the lowest thing there is! How could you possibly be degraded?”

  “I think it wants me to stop being a freak, I mean to stop having to show myself without my clothes on.”

  “Then it may be at ease! You may leave this instant, and take it with you! And should you, in your new dignity, feel any moral obligation for the shelter my circus and I have furnished, I hereby release you. Good-bye. Hail, and farewell!”

  “I don’t want to leave. I haven’t anywhere to go, nothing to do. It’s your fault that I’m here, not mine. It’s you that have the obligation.” Paused again, then something else came. Hadn’t thought at all, till I heard myself say it. “I could have Gili-Gili’s place, now that he’s gone.”

  “Well, well, well. You could have Gili-Gili’s place. Now that he’s gone, of course. Well, well. Well, well. And that’s why all these horrid things have happened.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t try to understand it. It’s done what it’s done, and Gili-Gili’s gone.”

  “Don’t understand? Well I do, you despicable little toad! If there is one thing in this world I understand, it is shabby jealousy among performers. I’ve seen enough of it, God knows, seen little else. You’d like to have his place, now that he’s gone. How simple! But tell me, have you no tremor of remorse? Driving the poor man to lunacy! Getting him arrested! Putting my circus, your home, into this turmoil! Do you realize that Aristo may never be the same? That I myself …? But I’ve a strong heart, and something of a constitution for bustling through the ways of freaks and so-called artists. No guilt at all, you disgusting reptile?”

  “I haven’t done anything. It’s the power that’s chosen me. I don’t control it. It uses me.”

  “How marvelously convenient! And this power you claim is inside you; it will be happy, that is tranquil, if you have Gili-Gili’s place?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. I think it made me mention Gili-Gili’s place, so I think it wants that.”

  “And what, may I beg to ask, will my circus and I receive if I accede to this nauseating blackmail? Can you do anything? No! Wait!” He threw his hands up, palms forward. “I don’t mean talking horses, or being whisked through space! Can you, or it, if you like, do any simple tricks such as might entertain normal folk without making lunatics out of my people?”

  Dropped my head. Stood shifting, left and right. Then it came on me, and I looked up smiling, reached forward and unscrewed the bulb from the lamp on his desk. I shifted the hot bulb from palm to palm, then grasped it by the bottom in my right hand. It lit, flared to an incandescence that filled the whole bus, and popped. Shards of grey glass fell softly down like snowflakes.

  “Something like that?”

  Don Lorenzo nodded slowly. He leaned back for a moment, then thrust himself up and stepped past me to the door. Paused there, then looked back at me.

  “On the same terms you have now. One-fourth the receipts of your special shows.”

  “One-half.” Didn’t think of it till I heard myself say it.

  Don Lorenzo gave me a look of total hatred. Which was at once prudently diluted with fear. And then a philosophic shrug: he’d still be making money.

  “Very well. I am accustomed to dealing with vermin.”

  He turned and stuck his head out the door into the warm rain, called to the waiting people:

  “We have reached a friendly understanding and a mutually rewarding settlement. There will be no more irregularities. The crisis is past.

  “Don’t stand there mooning at me! Get your costumes on! We play tonight on schedule!”

  17

  And play this morning on schedule, already in costume. For a quick step parade and a hoisting, my prance and my dance. For a simper-bitch fanflick, the starter whines, grating of gears. For cablebite painhorror cannot-be-happening choke-anguish. For face levered down, ground dragged away from my toes. Falling, revolving, sway-rocking, into my … Bug-futile leg-thrashing jerk-shoulder worse-making agon-jounce, fish-stupid can’t stop, gaff-flounder flipflop, hip-twisting swivel-wrist yank-tightening, strain-tendon tongue poking out from gaped carpmouth and troutbulging eyes brain ballooning on skullbone, chest tugging, heart thumpumping veins popping, bowels voiding ultimate dreamterror helplessness chaosed to fact, stop it stop it now stop it, but not by knocking my head on the window or cameras will think I’m smashing a shard for my throat not a bad idea glass thick though rush in here too soon or I won’t find a suitable sliver or, going to be hanged can’t escape it or alter my second sight twenty-twenty so I’ll stop it like this!

  Knuckles pressed in my eyes. Excellent stellar-bright pain, present pain driving off future, I’ve got the thing stopped.

  More to be safe, bring moth-flutter mind to rest. Now stroll to my sea-green chaise and recline sedately. Three-quarter shot and profile, never know the difference. Condemned spent a placid night.

  Known as stage fright. Which all performers suffer, even veterans and headliners. Though in different strains. Present case like when I was still a freakling, if a bit more severe. Miserable during my shows and suffered their anguish beforehand, wished the whole thing was over.

  Whereas El Mago Mandragon had jitters, but they always vanished once the show was on, so then I longed for the beginning not the end. Same when I learned I’d been cast for an interesting fate. Eager to get it onstage. But now I’ve spiraled round to dread again, wish it was over.

  And making it worse. Animal fit provoked by human imaginings. Thing is to stay depressed. Imagination deadened, or at least dulled. Or cozened toward something less horrid. Or purged with a dose of pain, so that the animal doesn’t start kicking four hours early, sick at both ends.

  No aspiration to meet it gracefully. Going to be strung up and animated. Hardly any more disgraceful if I went into my dance now for the closed-circuit cameras, if I’m already beshitted when the loop goes round my neck. Point is simply to keep the nightmare brief as possible. Four, five hours still before lift-off. Only two
three minutes of, let’s call it bother, and then my act’s over. Foolish to let imagination start it now. Stay depressed. Or put some word-thought between animal truth and me. Managed that naked in Zito’s truck, can manage it now.

  Not a flashy stunt. Not much beside even my lesser miracles. Modest attempt: get safely through a few hours into oblivion. But rather a challenge now that power’s left me, that I’m helpless again, that I’ve circled back to dread. Worthy in its way of El Mago Mandragon.

  Who was born on an evening at May’s end, and the curse was lifted. The plague of wonders ceased. Events at Amichevole’s Universal Circus observed a decent respect for commonplace reality.

  For the most part, anyway. Fire still refused to burn Mohotty. And other supposed laws of nature were flouted twice daily in the vicinity of the Rotunda’s newest attraction. But gently, for the most part gently. So that people whose sanity depended on reality’s being commonplace and law-abiding could look the other way, or pretend there was a natural explanation, that there was a trick to what was accomplished through me, something they’d understand if they knew the secret.

  Most of the circus people pretended I wasn’t there. Mortally frightened of me for a time—wasn’t that tasty!—and continued to avoid me even after memory of the May Horrors had receded. Which was fine with Mandragon. My audiences gave me plenty of human contact.

  I continued with Rebozo. Our solitudes continued to coexist. Contaminated by faint smears of human feeling, but we ignored them, hoped they might fade. He’d nursed me after all, some compassion involved there. But he ignored it, as I ignored my feelings of gratitude and, also, I began dreaming his dreams.