Quin?s Shanghai Circus (37 page)

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 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.