Quin’s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  Enormous wealth, enormous poverty. Thousands of entrepreneurs and tens of thousands of slaves. The opium rights to a province lost at a game of cards. Women given fortunes in exchange for an evening of pleasure, or thrown into the baggage train of a warlord as a different kind of payment. Peasant boys reigning as queens one day and tortured to death the next. Hundreds of people slaughtered because a Chinese or Japanese general wakes up in the morning with painful hemorrhoids.

  In food the favored delicacy is shrimp fed on human flesh. In alcohol and drugs the preferred mixture is laudanum, which combines the two.

  These are the simple facts and figures of Shanghai, a city crowded with White Russians and exiles and adventurers of every kind, the halfway point on the east coast of Asia, a terminal for victims of all breeds and races.

  Facts and figures. Are they enough, or is it possible that Shanghai was more than this? Not just a city but a state of mind, or to be more precise, an actual part of the mind? A vision we all carry somewhere within us?

  It is here that my father finds himself with his circus one winter late in the 1930s. He is the circus master and my mother, in order to be near him, has taught herself to be an aerialist. A group of wealthy degenerates approaches him for a special performance, a private showing, acts to match the times and mock them. He listens to them and agrees, implying a performance unlike any ever staged. He moves his circus to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city and goes to work alone rigging the high wires, preparing the props and costumes himself.

  The night of the circus comes. It is to begin exactly at midnight. The spectators arrive in evening dress and take their places while the band plays ruffles and flourishes. It is cold in the gloomy warehouse, but the excitement is too great for anyone to bother with that.

  Trumpets. A drooping clown holds a sign for silence.

  The drum rolls. A juggler spins a shadowy web of balls in the air.

  Now we see him stepping into the ring dressed in boots and frock coat, carrying a whip and megaphone, the shaman and arbiter of marvels. He raises the megaphone and we hear the acts he will present.

  The one-eyed tomb of Semarang.

  The sure-footed vine of Mindanao.

  The prancing Brunei horse.

  The untamed leopard of Irrawaddy.

  The Malacca cane.

  The one and only Johore jerkin in captivity.

  The spectators refuse to acknowledge this list of preposterous acts. Some are stupefied, others angry, a few fearful. They have brought bags of shrimp with them to eat during the performance, and now they begin noisily cracking the tails of the shrimp, peeling them, stuffing the rich meat into their mouths. There is hissing and shouting, stamping, catcalls.

  The snare drum rolls again, the juggler plays out his shadowy game. My father continues announcing acts that have never been acted, animals that have never lived. It’s nonsense, of course, yet all of it is serious as well as meaningless.

  At last he lowers the megaphone. He walks across the sawdust to the side of the ring looking up at my mother who is poised on the highbar, waiting for her trapeze act, a hundred feet above the ground.

  Does she understand at the moment what he is doing? What is about to happen?

  Perhaps. But it is too late for her or anyone to stop a performance that began long ago. Long ago, yes, and now it is here.

  Tuneless, masterless

  Come the acts of memory,

  A Shanghai circus.

  • • •

  Kikuchi-Lotmann untied his necktie. He took a black one from his pocket and knotted it in place.

  Poetry is a sauce, he said, and like all good sauces it should be both sweet and sour. The performance he had prepared that night, you see, was for a very small audience. The wealthy patrons in the stands, the animals and acts and clowns, the band and the jugglers were all props for a private performance he was about to stage for one person and one person alone, the woman on the highbar. To each of us love is a different mixture. To him it meant a ring and a bed.

  But before I complicate the tale, let me say that it is really very simple. A man is enamored with the dash and excitement of the circus. He gives his life to it and discovers too late that the love of one woman is more important. Now wasting one’s life is commonplace. This man’s madness came because he had knowingly refused the gift.

  The ring? The circus ring of course, the circle where a confident dissembler struts in his clever costumes sowing shouts and laughter, thinking he will trick life with his acts and disguises by tricking the fools who have come to watch him, which indeed he will one evening after another since spectators are there for that very purpose. The spectators applaud vigorously but after every performance the hall is emptied, and thus at the end of every clever evening the circus master must remember and remove the disguises he has squandered before the trumpets. He is naked then, trapped in the tight silence of the ring that has become his cage, alone with the squeezed tubes of paint and the hollow, worn costumes, standing alone on sawdust strewn with dead footprints that are mere acts of memory. Others come to see and marvel, they leave, and when they are gone he no longer exists.

  And the bed? The bed of my mother, all her beds in one. The bed where she was born and slept as a child, a girl, a young woman. Where she took her first lover and her first ten and twenty lovers and many more even after she married because her husband would not receive her love. Because he thought the circus was too important to him. Because he gave his life to become a ring master in the clamor and triumph of a sawdust circle.

  Probably he even encouraged her in those transitory affairs in order to be more at ease with himself, in order to think she wasn’t lonely, in order to hide from himself the fact that ultimately he could neither accept her love nor return it. Surely they both must have been involved in those acts of life that became decisive through repetition, even though the two of them might never have openly admitted they were making decisions.

  And so it went year after year. An ambitious costumed man cleverly performing in the ring. A lonely woman in a bed exchanging love for hope with one passerby after another, exchanging love for flowers, for dinner, for an evening with someone, anyone, so that at least for an evening time could pass finger by finger instead of minute by minute.

  The circus had always been his passion. When did its magic begin to slip away? When did he begin to have doubts about the trumpets that sounded when he stepped into the ring night after night? When did he begin to loathe the costumes and disguises? To detest the audiences who cheered only when he followed one act quickly with another? Who hissed when he faltered, hissed when he stumbled, demanded more and more, and then left the moment the performance ended?

  There is no way to know. It happened. The ring became a cage. He had to reinforce himself with heavier and heavier doses of alcohol before he could bring himself to put on his costumes, to fix a smile to his face, to step forward and pretend he was still pleased with himself, still in command of the animals, still trying to amuse the spectators, still striving for the applause that was now utterly meaningless to him. He was given to darker and darker moods. He became morose, even violent.

  His wife tried to help him but she couldn’t. Her kindness infuriated him because it reminded him of what he had lost in life, what he had thrown away. Despite her efforts the only time he could be intimate with her was after he had been drinking for hours. When he thought he could forget.

  A woman opens

  Her legs with smiles and gestures.

  The bed is crowded.

  Crowded with the men she had known over the years, the men he had driven her to. He tried to forget but he couldn’t. The woman he loved and the circus he hated mixed in his mind, the bed and the ring were entangled. One became a vision of the other and that vision obsessed him. When he looked at her now he saw a succession of vulgar defiling acts, the smiles and gestures of other men that were a part of her, a performing hell of screeching animals and leering jug
glers, clowns pulling water pumps out of their trousers, pulling live chickens out of their baggy trousers as they smirked and worked their tongues.

  A man so haunted by her past that a time came when he could no longer make love to her at all, no matter how much alcohol he had consumed. And that was the end for him. He could bear it no longer. Exhausted, totally humiliated, he prepared a last performance and stepped into the ring in front of a howling Shanghai mob.

  Trumpets. Snare drums. The spotlight rises to the ceiling where a tiny figure is crouching under the skylight, a world-famous dwarf whose high dive will be the opening act. All heads go back. Silence. The dwarf leaps into space blindfolded and hurtles down from the black sky.

  A thin silk cord, invisible from below, is attached to the dwarf’s ankle. At the last moment the silk cord will catch him. His fall will be broken a few inches above the floor. He will go into a long bouncing swing as he removes the blindfold, grins, waves triumphantly from his upside-down position.

  Except this time the cord is a few inches too long. The snares roll, the drums boom, and the dwarf’s head splatters over the sawdust.

  The end of a man who has been my father’s friend for years.

  At once the spotlight turns to three clowns approaching the stands on stilts a full thirteen feet high. The clowns assume antic poses. Their hands interpret various obscene suggestions. Suddenly there’s a sharp crack, one of the stilts has been sawed through the middle. The clown comes tumbling down, knocking over the other two as he falls.

  One man rips open his face, another is pierced through the heart by the broken stilt. The third lies on his back opening and closing his mouth, unable to move or make a sound.

  Once more the spotlight shifts, this time to a balancing act. A man with huge biceps is peddling a unicycle while juggling balls with both hands. On his forehead he supports a tall metal pole, on top of the pole is a crossbar where a naked woman bends backward. The man seems to be peddling more rapidly, the balls drop away. The heavy pad meant to protect his head has been tampered with, the end of the pole has been sharpened and is slowly boring into his head. As the woman on the crossbar spreads her crotch wide to the audience, the pole splits her partner’s skull in two.

  She crashes to the ground. The spotlight shoots into the air.

  An aerial performance. A woman hangs by her knees from a trapeze, a mouthpiece clamped between her teeth. From the mouthpiece dangles another trapeze on which two wiry men, also hanging by their knees, masturbate each other while cursing their female relatives. The woman’s neck muscles bulge even more than expected, for the mouthpiece isn’t the one she generally uses. This mouthpiece has been fitted with a spring that gradually expands in her mouth. Of course she can’t spit it out, nor can she scream. The fellatio comes to an end when the two ejaculating men follow their sperm toward the ring together with the lower half of the woman’s face, her hanging tongue showing where she has been severed at the ears.

  These opening acts, meant to set a circus mood, are quickly over. Now the spotlight dips back and forth, leaving the ring in darkness. The audience responds to the darkness by swinging their little red lights.

  The flashlights were my father’s idea, miniature red lights on a string. He had devised them after long experience with audiences of children.

  A circus ring is continually being darkened to prepare for the next act, and it seems that when a large number of children are gathered together in darkness they have a irresistible urge to exert themselves. They shriek, they tear off their clothes, they punch and kick each other and try to urinate on someone’s face.

  My father introduced the little red lights so the children could amuse themselves when the hall was dark. Then he noticed that the parents of the children also enjoyed swinging the lights. Subsequently he never gave a performance without passing around the little red lights to everyone.

  Although sophisticated and wealthy, the Shanghai audience was the same as any other when it came to darkness. While an act was under way they cracked and peeled their shrimps, giggled, nudged one another, and congratulated themselves. But the moment the act ended they desperately swung their little red lights.

  A sense of community, perhaps, in that vast and gloomy warehouse?

  There was always an undercurrent of fear, you see, in the old Shanghai, fear of a special kind. The city hung by the sea, a dot of land under international control. Beyond it stretched all of China and more, all of Asia. Tens of thousands of miles of interminable mountains and deserts. Tens of millions of nameless people babbling in unknown tongues. Swarming river valleys and uninhabitable mountain ranges. Caravan trails spiraling back into antiquity.

  Who were these bewildering peoples? What esoteric fantasies might be the heritage of tribes that had wandered for millennia on the byways of unrecorded languages?

  A few travelers had always explored these ancient routes. Learned Arabs, gentle Nestorians, adventurous Greeks. Some even reached the Pacific and lived to pass on their tales to the curious. But the stories they told only hinted at the mysteries to be found out there, the dragon bones of lost and future worlds, the illusions of mystics and madmen.

  Shanghai stood on the edge of this hinterland. There were only a few people there, relatively speaking, with only a few days or weeks to live. To them this precarious existence on the edge of China had become man’s precarious existence on the edge of sanity. That’s what I meant when I said that Shanghai, then, was not only a state of mind but an actual part of mind. Within the narrow bounds of the city, people explored depravity, to be sure, but perhaps that was only because the wastes that lay beyond were too vast to contemplate.

  These creatures now swung their little red lights in the warehouse of my father’s mind, the circus of his life. The ring was tiny, the warehouse huge, the walls were lost in darkness. There was nothing for them to do but huddle together in front of the master of ceremonies past and present, the magician and lord of the acts.

  A Shanghai circus, then, a circus of the mind. My mother still watches from the highbar a hundred feet in the air. My father stands in the middle of the ring with his megaphone and whip, waiting, and at last the audience begins to see the truth. One by one the skilled performers, his oldest friends, are being maimed and killed. Now one by one the spectators cease to nibble the fat shrimps in their laps. Instead they squirm and whine as they swing their little red lights.

  My father points his megaphone. The regular performances have ended, he has seen enough of human acts. The time has come for animals. With growing fury he shouts out the names of the beasts he will present.

  The Afghan ibis.

  The unicorn and centaur and sphinx.

  The Cochin mermaid, the humpbacked zebra, the

  two-legged sheep.

  The pregnant tapir, the Sunda sable and purple

  sail.

  The hairless ibex and furry dolphin.

  And a dozen more, all the monsters his tortured mind can conjure up. The cages are opened under the spotlight. Save for the circle of little red lights, the warehouse is lost in blackness.

  The animals have not been fed in weeks, nor does their trainer give them any commands. His whip is curled around his legs and he watches them without moving. They paw the ground, staring at the little red lights that spin like eyes in a jungle night.

  The Siberian tiger is the first to move. His tail swishes, his head goes down.

  The leap carries him thirty feet into the stands, little enough for a tiger that size. The beast chews his way through the undergrowth and leaps again, snapping and growling, a head hanging from his maw.

  The tiger’s roar is a signal to all the animals. The panther moves quickly, then the leopard, the bison, the herd of baboons, the rhinos and horses and monkeys, the hulking elephants. They crawl and swing through the stands chopping and clawing jungle eyes. An elderly woman is caught between a female elephant and an advancing male. Her daughters, products of successive unnatural unions with her twin
brothers many years before, are assaulted in several positions by a pack of baboons. A man falls under the thrusts of a rhino’s horn, another is straddled by the bison. A horse eats its way into a leg thick with swollen veins and buried abscesses.

  The big cats leap from pile to pile, the monkeys root in the rubbish, stealing shoes and eyeglasses and false limbs, especially teeth inlaid with gold. The shiny metal attracts them and whenever they see a victim captured by a larger beast, nuzzling to find a liver that isn’t sclerotic, they pull out the pretty teeth before the head is swallowed.

  The baboons abandon the two hemorrhaging daughters and go in search of scirrhoid lesions. They had discovered a cancer in one of the girls that was tastier than the undiseased parts, which in that wealthy group tended to be too fat and oversalted. In just such a short time the baboons have also become specialists.

  Last comes the jackal, a cautious beast. He circles a body many times before approaching, for he requires a man or woman who is alive yet paralyzed. When he finds one he settles down on his sticky haunches and performs the sexual act on the victim’s mouth. He then licks the mouth clean and moves on, a silk evening cloak over his shoulders, earrings dangling from his teeth.

  The band plays, the tubas thump, the snares roll. The base drum booms, the horns blare unrelated chords, and the ring master stands alone in the spotlight. Just beyond the circle a juggler tosses an array of torches into the sky, toward the highbar where my mother watches the little red lights disappear.

  By now all the animals have found a specialty. The monkeys hide sackfuls of gold teeth. The baboons wear expensive sport clothes and eat only cancerous tissue. The rhinos wallow in women’s underwear, the elephants trample eyeglasses into grains of sand. The horses prance in review, the leopard licks its hind quarters, the panther crunches kneecaps and other heavy bones, the Siberian tiger studies the stains left on the seats. The dogs, decorated in ribbons and epaulets, dance on two feet while the jackal pursues his solitary course along the fringe.

  My mother saw it all. She saw him descend into the circus where lust and teeth and the wail of a victim are joined together in a single act, where animals run free and bodies pile up while a band plays and a juggler lifts torches end over end. She saw the performance rage and die, saw him step out of the ring and move away from the life where once he had ruled.