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.
A monotonous juggler. A discordant band. A herd of snoring animals.
She shivers from the cold. After so much meat the animals will sleep for days. Even the jackal has closed his eyes. The band is sleeping too, lost in the nirvana of an opium dream. The spotlight still lights the juggler, but less clearly now. The torches give off an oily smoke and burn low as the juggler falls asleep beside them.
The spotlight is gone, the gloom begins to lift. From the skylight above her head dawn dimly falls on the interior of the empty warehouse.
After that? After my father stepped out of the ring he was never seen again. Armies were marching, war was coming. The great circus was beginning in which millions would have a part to play, an act, a specialty. The audience in Shanghai was soon forgotten, as was my father’s night in a deserted warehouse.
Those people, you see, would have died soon anyway. They were looking for death, and one way or another they would have found it. They were on the edge, voyeurs a step away waiting for the final spectacle. They must have known they had gone to the warehouse that night to witness their own deaths. After all, there was nothing else left to see.
So it wouldn’t be right to say they were victims that night. There were only two victims. The ring and the bed were theirs, the circus was theirs, the sounds and the smells and the horrors were theirs.
Thus when dawn came she gripped the trapeze and took a last breath. She balanced on her toes and the trapeze swung wide as it had many times before. And as she had many times before, she left it and turned the graceful, loving figures in the air.
Turned and turned through three somersaults, hung still where there was no hand to catch her. Still for a moment, one moment before she spiraled down and down.
Kikuchi-Lotmann’s glasses had fogged. He cleaned them on his necktie, his eyes black dots.
I have never forgotten, he said in a low voice. I have remembered and lived accordingly. How could it be otherwise?
Heaven and water go their opposite ways,
Thus in all transactions the superior man
Carefully considers the beginning.
Not mine and not a haiku either. That one’s from the old book. To the ancient Chinese the superior man was the ordinary man, that’s what it means. So I have remembered the way they lived and the torment it brought them and done the opposite, doing everyday business in a businesslike way, putting the war and the passions they knew behind me, satisfying myself with the mundane affairs of ordinary business because I have considered my beginning, my father, and where it led him.
Where did it lead him? said Quin.
To the interior of China I suppose, the coastline was already at war. But where exactly would be impossible to say. Wandering the trails of those learned Arabs perhaps, those gentle Nestorians and adventurous Greeks. Or rather I’d like to think that. As with the audience in the warehouse that night, it would be better not to know the end. It would be better to think he’s still wandering.