Quin’s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  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 small 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.

  Now Adzhar has been gone for many years, but there was a Japanese who knew him well, who was a close friend and will certainly receive the code book in his name. Our man is so poor he can’t take the train to Kamakura, he has to walk. Thousands witness this hulking bundle of rags slowly making his way south down the highway. He walks and walks, each step a torment, and at last reaches the town, finds the house, learns to his dismay that Rabbi Lotmann has been dead for twenty years, killed in a fire bomb raid at the end of the war.

  A fire bomb raid in Kamakura? Impossible. Some unique fate existed here, perhaps still exists here.

  Vague recollections. Dim intimations.

  Our man is too exhausted to think clearly. He’s delirious from lack of food and the craving of his powerful addiction. The housekeeper explains the nature of the rabbi’s death and also explains that the house is being maintained as a shrine in perpetuity by the dead man’s adopted son, an operator who is not only the richest gangster in greater east Asia but the third richest gangster in the world.

  Weak from the long walk, raving in a whisper, our man faints in the doorway. The housekeeper rushes away to buy smelling salts. After she leaves, almost at once, our man curiously regains consciousness and lets himself into the house.

  He is amazed or perhaps not amazed to find the living room filled with heavy silver objects. There is a large menorah, a silver-embossed Haggadah, a silver-embossed siddur, a silver-plated tallith, a silver-plated tsistsis, an unusual tvillin made of silver rather than wood and leather, a heavy solid silver plaque engraved with the legend mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

  What is to be done? Is silver any longer of use to a man who has ascended to heaven in a whirlwind?

  Quickly our man gathers up all the silver objects he can lay his hands on and stuffs them into a sack. As payment he leaves behind in a prominent place the secret code book, the keys to the kingdom. They belong to Elijah because he has lived a life that will turn the lock, lived so meekly his push will swing wide the gate.

  The sack of loot on his back, our man opens the front door.

  A memory.

  The holy man whose altar he has desecrated was a diabetic. A diabetic? Dimly there stirs in his tired brain scenes he has witnessed in a locked, shuttered room in Shanghai, even more remote scenes witnessed on rooftops in the Bronx. He makes his way to the medicine cabinet and finds there what he is looking for, the large hypodermic needle used by the rabbi for injecting insulin. He has recalled that before Elijah ascended to heaven he passed on his mantle to his successor.

  This then will be the mantle our man receives from the prophet. A hypodermic needle.

  He flees. He staggers into the nearest pawnshop and stumbles into the back room, there to empty out his sack. His loathing for what he has done is so great he will accept no more than a ten-thousandth part of the real value of the heavy silver. He leaves sack and silver behind and runs from the pawnshop with his miserable fist of coins.

  He buys a cheap valise and stuffs it with bottles of cheap gin. At the railroad station he throws down his few remaining
coins and says he wants a ticket down the coast. He will go as far as those coins will take him.

  It’s over now and he knows it. He has robbed the grave of the prophet. He intends to sit by the sea until the gin bottles are empty, then piss one final time into the wind and drown himself.

  The train lets him off at a fishing village. He limps down to the beach, ignoring the astonished stares of the villagers, and sits down on the sand. A wind has begun to blow, but no matter. First he takes off the black bowler hat he has worn for nearly thirty years, ever since that morning he picked it up in a deserted warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai and went away to hide and eat horseradish, the first of many times he would eat horseradish to try to quell the stink of his own soul, a stench that had first overpowered him that morning when he went to the warehouse to help his sister, to help the man who had been a boyhood friend, and discovered he was too late.

  Too late. The night before the circus his projector had broken down. Two frames had stuck together in the lens and hypnotized him, put him to sleep. And so the next day he began eating horseradish, he put the black bowler hat on his head and never took it off in order to remember always the hatred he felt for his own black soul.

  Now he removes that black hat and in its place he ties a large one made of straw, so low it covers his face, a hat worn in the Orient only by men condemned to death and by mendicant monks, those two alone, for it is traditional wisdom in the Orient not to look upon the face of a man about to die or the face of a man who begs in the name of Buddha.

  The straw hat is affixed, the greatcoat is wrapped around him. He takes the mantle of Elijah and opens the first bottle of gin, pours, fills the hypodermic, recaps it. As he has seen others do, he ties a cord around the upper part of his arm. He touches a bulging vein. He plunges the needle into the vein and pushes the gin into his bloodstream.

  A scream. Is this the still, small voice Elijah heard in the desert?

  The needle falls from his hand and he’s a long time in finding it. Slowly he cleans the needle on the red flannel wrapped around his neck, cumbersome work because he can’t see what he’s doing, because he’s already incapable of untying the string around the flannel and holding the flannel in front of him.

  Finally the needle is free from sand or more or less free from sand. Once more he pours gin, fills the needle, stabs his vein.

  Shoots gin.

  Shooting up a valise of gin.

  Night comes. He has finished one bottle and started on another. The wind lashes him, the waves whirl high in the air. By morning he has emptied all the bottles and the sea has carried them away, carried away the valise and the needle as well, for now the typhoon is blowing full force.

  A man sits on the sand in the eye of chaos and he neither sees nor hears. His legs are crossed, his chin rests on his chest, he is oblivious to all that passes in the world. Even if the princes and despots of a thousand lawless regions were to attack him it would be useless. Nor could the entire assembly of man attract his attention with their pleas, their dreams, their follies. He is invulnerable to everyone and everything, beyond sensation, alone at the end of the earth, alone on the far side of the moon, the dark side, with only the void as companion and parent and child.

  The typhoon blows three days and three nights. As it subsides our man awakes at the bottom of the sea, on the floor of the ocean, where the typhoon has draped him with seaweed. Seaweed hangs from his straw hat, encrusts his arms, embraces his shoulders and his belly. The entire lower half of his body is hidden beneath the slippery fingers of rich iodine matter.

  His legs are numb and his bad shoulder aches. He is cold, wet, devastated, totally ravaged. His mind is dazed and his eyes are two slim, slanting pools of nothingness. It is as if he were thinking thoughts too profound to be uttered.

  On the ocean floor our man sees in front of him a line of gnarled, sturdy ancients, village elders, men who have known a life at sea. Their faces are the bows of ships, their hands are fish hooks. It is a scarred and weathered delegation, an embassy from some distant land above the sea. He watches them fall to their knees and press their foreheads to the sand.

  The sands around him are stained with excrement and vomit and urine. A smell of putrid flesh hangs in the air, a stink of decay given off by layers of rotting clothing soaked under seaweed. Yet this foreign embassy seems unaware of the foul odors rising from the foul sands. They are bewitched by the immense, immobile figure dressed in seaweed.

  He sees them gaze in awe at his straw hat and he realizes they have mistaken it. To them it is not the sign of the condemned man, it is the mark of the monk who traces the merciful steps and begs in the name of Buddha. Yes, obviously they have mistaken it.

  Or is it he who has mistaken it?

  For it seems that during the last three days and nights much of the Japanese coast has been destroyed. Above and below the village fishing fleets are wrecked, houses washed away, friends and relatives drowned. This village alone among hundreds has been spared. And how can that be unless the stranger who arrived mysteriously at the onset of the storm and took up his place by the sea, remaining there for three days and nights oblivious to wind and rain and waves, unless the stranger is a reincarnation of Nichiren, that militant holy man of the thirteenth century?

  The village elders press their heads to the sand. They offer prayers to their patron saint and beg him to have mercy on them always, to protect them and stay with them forever, to honor them by living on the food they will provide in the temple they will provide.

  Our man shakes loose the seaweed that encumbers him and rises to the surface of the water. He looks at the sun. He looks at the house in the pine grove on the cliff above the sea. He removes the straw hat that covers his face and recalls the words learned long ago in a No play, the words taught to him by a thin erect No actor of incomparable skill and subtlety, magnificat anima mea Dominum, my soul doth magnify the Lord.

  Thus he bows and accepts the vocation that has come to him at last. Gravely he raises his head and greets the embassy of that small empire you see across the bay.

  • • •

  It was dark on the terrace. Geraty lit a candle and placed it between them in a glass chimney. His massive, solemn face hung over the railing searching for something below, a seagull or a rock or a wave.

  The candle flickered. Briefly Geraty raised his hand to preach to the invisible seagulls, the invisible rocks, the invisible waves.

  When do you leave?

  Tomorrow. My ship sails from Yokohama.

  Quite so.

  Do you ever think of any of them anymore? Of America?

  No. Never. There is no America here inside me, no Tokyo and no Shanghai either.

  Geraty loomed up in front of Quin. His presence swelled until he filled the shadows of the terrace, his breathing noisier than the waves on the sides of the cliff. He was frowning. His white hair swirled over his face.

  It may be, nephew, that you don’t quite understand it yet. It’s true that a monk ruled in the thirteenth century, a monk and not the Emperor or the great General or even the reckless circus master with his desperate, clever acts. Of course I’m not sure who you are, we can never be sure with another, but that doesn’t matter. The fishermen of this village believe I have the powers of Nichiren. They might even believe I’m a reincarnation of his strange spirit. But how could that be? Is that really the way it is?

  Geraty stared hard at Quin. Far back in those huge eyes Quin saw a smile begin, and precisely at that moment the candle flame came to rest. The light was somber, still. The wind had stopped.

  Not enough, whispered Geraty. Not just his powers and his will. What they perhaps don’t know is what you perhaps don’t know. It’s the final truth of the final scene, and it may be that no one knows it except me. Yet it’s simple enough, simpler than anyone would suspect.

  I am Nichiren.

  Geraty exploded in laughter. His hand struck his belly, and as it did a wind came. The dancing flame of th
e candle leapt and went out. The pine trees shivered, the seagulls shrieked, the sea surged above the rocks. In the darkness of a minute or an hour or all the years of his life Quin listened to the echoes of Geraty’s booming laughter.

  • • •

  He found the crevice under the pine trees and crept along the cliff to where the path became less steep. The wind was cold and he walked with his collar up, his back hunched. Halfway to the village he stopped and looked back.

  The house was hidden. Did the Buddha sit with a candle? Did he peer through the blackness at the seagulls, the rocks, the waves?

  Quin trudged along with his caravan, the lean Emperor and the small General marching to a silent stony drum, the animals in their cages, the jugglers wafting painted flutes and mingling torches in the air. Lotmann played his music, Adzhar spoke in a still, small voice, Lamereaux stroked the moss in his monastery, and Mama prayed on the lotus of her ivory elephant. The aerialist turned a somersault, the Siberian tiger pawed the ground. A brother solemnly changed his necktie, another sang across the sand.

  It was a long parade and Quin walked ahead of it wearing the frock coat, carrying the megaphone, no announcement too extreme between the rice paddies and the beach, no costume too bizarre, no act of memory too daring.

  He left the waterfront and climbed up the narrow street to the square beside the station. There an itinerant storyteller was setting up his stage. Children clustered in front of the empty frame.

  The storyteller was so old his head shook. His tiny stage stood on three poles. He fitted a cardboard painting into the open frame, then assumed the voices of those who were shown.

  First came a boy and his parents. The boy wandered along the beach and met a dragon who carried him to the emerald kingdom beneath the sea. A Princess spoke of the enchanted life that would be his if he remained there, but the boy elected to return to his home. He waved to the Princess and rose above the waves again, waved to the dragon and walked along the beach to find the trees moved, the houses gone, the familiar paths now leading elsewhere.