Quin?s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  I’m only sorry, said one man, that he wasn’t around to face a court after the war. Or at least to face us.

  After the war? said Quin.

  Yes, he died a few days after Japan surrendered, I’m not sure how. One story has it that he came back to Tokyo and finally succumbed to acute alcoholism. Another was that he returned to Kamakura and went insane, committed suicide by throwing himself under a collapsing wall during a typhoon.

  In any case he’s gone. A lost curiosity and an ugly one.

  Geraty’s history, by contrast, seemed to begin where the Jesuit’s had ended.

  Little was known of his life before the war other than that he lived in Tokyo claiming to be the representative of a Canadian firm that manufactured quack leprosy drugs. He was a gloomy man who kept to himself, he was uncommunicative and seldom spoke to Westerners. On the rare occasions when anyone saw him he was always alone. He never tried to peddle his drugs and had no apparent source of income. In fact, he never seemed to do much of anything.

  One suggestion was that he had been a criminal wanted in the United States. Another possibility was that he had been smuggling contraband from Mukden to Shanghai, for that was the route he took when he left Tokyo in the 1930s. He appeared to have remained in Shanghai until the coming of the war, when he escaped from China to the Philippines. Trapped there by the Japanese invasion, he went into hiding in the mountains.

  As soon as the Japanese surrendered he presented himself to the American forces as a legendary guerrilla figure who had been fighting alone in the mountains for years, an elaborate tale he told with such conviction he was awarded a decoration for valor and recommended for a colonel’s commission in the army reserve.

  While waiting for his commission to be approved, Geraty talked himself into a flight to Japan on the basis of his knowledge of the language and his long experience both there and in China. He arrived back in Tokyo during the first days of the Occupation and was given a sensitive position doing preliminary research in the archives of the Imperial Army, more specifically the captured Kempeitai files on China.

  Geraty was in the job only a month or two when a mysterious fire burned down an entire wing of the warehouse where the Kempeitai files were stored. The American authorities were immediately suspicious because of the absence of paper ashes in the ruins. Furthermore, a blind Japanese beggar who had been sleeping in a gutter near the warehouse reported that he had been awakened by a convoy of passing trucks on the night of the fire.

  A few telephone calls revealed that although a number of military trucks were out on various errands at the time of the fire, no one had authorized a convoy anywhere in the Tokyo area.

  This information coincided with a report on Geraty’s pending commission. A routine investigation in the Philippines had showed that the giant American was remembered in many mountain villages, but only for his outrageous indolence. Hundreds of peasants were ready to testify that he had done nothing during the war but steal their homemade beer and sleep. It was true he had taught their children to sing Onward Christian Soldiers and had urged them to march off and fight the Japanese, but he himself had never left the safety of the remote mountaintop church where his hammock was strung in a dark corner behind the altar.

  Geraty was called in and shown the report, which he read without comment. The beggar was brought in to repeat his testimony. Geraty’s observation then was that the blind man was starving and therefore probably subject to hallucinations. To prove his point he gave the ravenous beggar a turnip and asked him how it tasted. The shaking old man replied that it had the bouquet of green tea, the flavor of new rice, and the delicate consistency of the finest raw tuna. Geraty patted the old man on the head, offered to buy him a sackful of turnips, and turned back to his accusers grinning broadly.

  He was fired on the spot and told he would never be able to work for the American government again, an announcement he accepted with a guffaw and a gesture so insulting he was thrown out the door.

  Thereafter he supported himself by conducting lurid after-hour entertainments for American officers and their wives. While stationed in the bar of one of the better Tokyo hotels he would allude to what he called the frightening sexual habits of the everyday man in kimono. Most of the Americans in the Occupation knew nothing about Japan and Geraty obviously knew a great deal. In the course of an evening, besides having his drinks paid for, he generally managed to talk himself into at least one private showing.

  Beginning at midnight, he would say, because that’s when these demons come alive. These vices sprang up during the era of warring states when the capital was in Kyoto, saints preserve us, before the devils moved their foul activities to Kamakura. You’ve seen Kyoto? Then you know the dark alleys I’m talking about, the hidden passageways and trapdoors, the monasteries tucked away up in the hills where even the most hideous screams would go unheard. The boating parties were always set for midnight, and long before dawn, you can be sure, the tortured victims were bound and gagged and weighted and flung into the water so there would be no evidence of the fiendish pleasures witnessed only by the moon. Read the old chronicles, it’s all there and has been for a thousand years. There’s an awesome legacy, I tell you, behind the blank face and ingratiating manners of the everyday man in kimono. But possibly for a certain sum, if we went about it in the right way, a man and his drinking companion or even a man and his wife might be able to catch a glimpse of these lost lustful aberrations, these age-old sinewy slithering depravities of the Eastern mind. Why come to the Orient and not see the truth? How can we overcome evil unless we see it in all its perverse variations?

  Geraty would grow more florid as the evening wore on, his huge head hovering above the bar, his eyes bulging as he intoned the names of his favorite saints.

  Atrocities, he would hiss, atrocities a thousand years old, Satanic atrocities sipped and soaked and sating. Cormorants were sent to fish in the Uji just before dawn, and not just for fish. Nobles unmasked their falcons, warrior monks unsheathed their swords, warrior abbots unleashed their spiders and bats, whole battalions of enslaved children screamed from the shadows. What’s that you say? A private showing?

  Geraty licking his chin and whirling down drinks, staggering off through back streets at midnight with his customers trotting in his steps, stumbling down the stairway to some dingy cellar where he would empty half a bottle and chant verses from the first chapter of St. Luke, the prayer wheel turning in his mind, while bringing on a crowd of hungry, tired performers and lining them up against the wall, while turning the spotlight on himself and undressing as he muttered memories from his childhood, from Mukden and Shanghai and the old Tokyo, a journey that led west and south through Manchuria and China to a long sleep in the mountains of the Philippines before returning to Japan, where he now took off his clothes in order to display his fat massive body to a few dazed, sleepy spectators.

  Over the years Geraty’s acts deteriorated. After the first postwar months it was difficult for him to find the starving youths who would degrade themselves for so little money. His girls deserted him for cleverer operators, his boys grew older and older. What had begun as a giggling dance by corrupt children ended as a stiff parade of derelicts with nothing to show the audience or each other but collapsed veins and ulcerous sores.

  Geraty himself found it increasingly impossible to break out of his alcoholic stupors. There were evenings when his exhibition of the history of Oriental lust consisted entirely of him taking off his clothes. He would stand in the spotlight mumbling the line he always repeated when naked, magnificat anima mea Dominum, at the same time as he fought off swarms of imaginary falcons and shouted orders at hordes of invisible children. After a time the whirlpool closed around him and he sank to the floor, collapsed on the immense black barge that was carrying Kyoto and all its ancient monasteries down through the night to the sea, there to begin for the ten thousandth time his incomprehensible recitation of dates and addresses, the journey across Asia that Quin rememb
ered from the bar in the Bronx.

  So ended Geraty’s first decade after the war. Business dropped off, tourists avoided him. He was thrown out of hotel bars and told not to return. Whenever he got any money he spent it on a drinking bout that lasted until the money was gone. More often he could be seen behind a noodle stand in one of the slums of the city, washing a few dishes in exchange for a pinch of horseradish.

  Quin asked about the rare Buddhist manuscripts owned by Geraty, the extensive collection of pornography he had supposedly annotated.

  He found that not only had no one ever heard of the collection, no one believed such manuscripts could really exist. And in any case, it was inconceivable that they had been translated by the old giant with the horseradish habit.

  A scholarly exercise so vast it would take a convoy of trucks to transport it?

  They shook their heads in the bar and laughed. Obviously Quin had his man confused with someone else.

  When Quin returned from his wanderings in Tokyo, when he came back to the apartment where Big Gobi was waiting patiently for him, watching television, he always put his arms around Big Gobi and hugged him. That was the way they greeted each other. Quin smiling, Big Gobi grinning with tears in his eyes because he was so happy.

  Well, Gobes, I hope I wasn’t gone too long.

  It was nothing, Quin, nothing at all. You know you never have to worry about leaving me alone. I always know you’re coming back.

  They hugged again, Big Gobi laughed. Ever since he was a child he had always wanted to touch people and have them touch him. It was the only way he could be sure they were real. But at the orphanage they had never understood that. When he put his huge hands on the other boys they had always backed away from him.

  Stop pawing everyone, said the fathers.

  Run away when he does that, they told the other boys.

  From the beginning Big Gobi’s hands had disturbed him, even frightened him. He was never sure what they might do. For that reason he stopped touching the other boys, so they wouldn’t dislike him, and instead watched them carefully so he could understand how they acted, what they did and how they did it, so that he could do it the same way. He listened to them and said the same things. He watched their mouths and laughed the same way. He imitated everything about them and made the same silly faces.

  But for some reason the faces weren’t silly on Big Gobi. And when he laughed it didn’t seem funny.

  On Sunday nights they had oyster stew at the orphanage. While still young, Big Gobi discovered he loved oysters. He loved the smell of the sea that came from the pale jelly. He loved them because they were shapeless, because they had no hands.

  When he was old enough he asked for the job of opening the oysters on Sunday afternoons. They showed him how to do it, and it was his happiest hour of the week. Alone behind the kitchen facing the sky and the fields, the receding ridges of the Berkshires, he slit the cartilage of the shells and peeked into the juicy caves of tides and algae, a calm, quiet place, a home deep and narrow, light brown, sucking and oozing, darker at the edges.

  And for Big Gobi there were other sensations hidden in the mysterious oyster, not so much peaceful as ecstatic. Once while he was shucking them, once and no more so that he would never be caught, he sneaked an oyster for himself and held it above his lips, let it slide down slowly and swell in his throat until he grew dizzy and began to shake, felt a numbness in his loins and then a warm sticky wetness there.

  An exquisite experience certainly, but for Big Gobi, not unexpected. Strangely similar, in fact, to the wonders the fathers attributed to the act of communion whereby God momentarily possessed the soul.

  About the time Big Gobi should have gone to school they discovered his shoulder was malformed. The shoulder was operated on and allowed to heal, broken again and allowed to heal. Throughout his childhood he was operated on every year, and during the recoveries there was nothing to do but watch television.

  He didn’t care about the programs but he loved the commercials because they told him what to do. They told him where to go every day. They told him how to get there. They advised him what to buy and what to eat, what to drink, when to drink it. They told him what to do once he was home again, and after that and later and the next time, everything he needed to know about life.

  Of course he was an orphan who lived in an orphanage, he had no money, and his shoulder was in a plaster cast so there was no question of going anywhere or doing anything or buying anything. He had to eat and drink what he was given to eat and drink, when he was given it.

  But none of that mattered. The commercials were concerned with his welfare. They watched over him. They cared for him the way family and friends might have cared for him had there been family and friends in his life. So he returned the love of the commercials. He loved them as they loved him.

  The first time Big Gobi whispered that secret to Quin, Quin didn’t laugh or even smile. He just put his arms around Big Gobi and hugged him to show that he understood. Yet even then Big Gobi hadn’t been able to bring himself to mention the tuna fish. Instead he had pretended he had gone directly from the orphanage into the army.

  He told them he didn’t want to go, but they said he had to. One afternoon during training he was sitting outside the barracks not doing anything, staring at the sand and thinking of television commercials, humming them, repeating their warnings and instructions, when all at once a corporal kicked him and shouted that he was out of his head, that he’d missed a meal sitting there, that he must be crazy if he didn’t know enough to eat.

  What’s a crazy bastard like you doing in the army? They don’t let crazy bastards into the army.

  That night Big Gobi was so excited he couldn’t sleep. The next morning he sat down on the edge of his cot and refused to go to breakfast. They pushed him and yelled at him and threw him into the shower. After refusing to eat for three days he was taken to see a doctor.

  The doctor asked him questions and sent him to another doctor. The second doctor asked him more questions and moved him to a hospital with bars on the windows. Every morning the doctor came to ask the same questions again.

  Do you like the army? Are you afraid of the army? Do you like boys? Do you like animals? Are you afraid of men?

  Big Gobi smiled and answered all the questions with a different answer every day. The only questions he always answered the same were those about the army.

  I like the army very much, he said. I want to spend my life in the army.

  Why won’t you eat then?

  Big Gobi smiled. He wasn’t hungry. The doctor pointed at his arms and legs.

  Hungry? You’re starving.

  Big Gobi smiled. He didn’t know about that. All he knew was that he wasn’t particularly hungry.

  One day a nurse came to his bed with a large hypodermic needle. She showed him the thick point of the needle, how long it was, how much fluid the hypodermic held. She made him hold it so he could see how heavy it was.

  This is water, she said, and its only effect is pain. If I inject this water into your arm you’ll be in pain all afternoon. Just tell me you don’t want it and I won’t give it to you.

  Big Gobi smiled and put out his arm.

  That night the nurse came back with the hypodermic. She said the pain would certainly keep him awake all night. But if he didn’t want it she wouldn’t give it to him. Big Gobi smiled and was still awake when she brought the hypodermic again in the morning.

  Big Gobi spent his foodless, sleepless days and nights watching the soldier in the next bed. The soldier took a long time with his meals because he was right-handed and ate with his left hand. He kept a razor in his right hand and even while eating he continued to shave himself, shaving only the right side of his body.

  He started with his right foot and shaved his right leg. He shaved the right half of his pubic hair and belly and chest, his right armpit, the right side of his face, his right eyebrow, and the right side of his head. When he had finished he wen
t down to his right big toe and started over again.

  Although he worked without water, soap, or mirror, the soldier never cut himself.

  Big Gobi took the water injections for two months. He never ate and he never slept, he smiled and told everyone he loved the army. At the end of that time, unable to stand or even raise his head, he was given a medical discharge and taken by ambulance back to the orphanage.

  When Big Gobi had regained his strength he was told he would have to leave and support himself. The fathers gave him a bus ticket and a sum of money sufficient for three or four months. The bus ticket was good for thirty days of unlimited travel anywhere in the United States.

  Big Gobi was twenty-one years old. He took a bus to Boston and spent almost all his money in three days eating raw oysters. He asked where less expensive oysters could be found and was told the Maine coast. At noon the following day he arrived in Eastport on the Canadian border. By mid-afternoon the last of his money was gone.

  He took a bus down the coast to Plymouth, Salem, and Lexington, a few of the sites made famous by the early English colonists. Next he went to Valley Forge, Yorktown, and Mt. Vernon tracing the steps of Washington during and after the War for Independence. He traveled to Atlanta and turned east to Charlestown on the route taken by Sherman during the Civil War. He rode down the section of the Florida coast where Ponce de León had sought the fountain of youth, reached the tip of the Florida Keys, traversed the Gulf Coast to the delta of the Mississippi. He bisected the country to the headwaters of the Mississippi, viewed the Great Lakes, sped across the plains of the former Sioux nation, and rose through the Rockies on the path favored by the solitary French voyageurs. On the far side of the old Northwest Territories he once more found himself standing on the Canadian border, this time with the Pacific beside him instead of the Atlantic.

  He crossed railroads built by Chinese and dropped down to the tabernacle of the Mormons on the shores of the shrinking Great Salt Lake. He traveled the Spanish trail of the first European explorers through Santa Fe, surveyed the Rio Grande and the Grand Canyon and Yosemite and Yellowstone and Old Faithful, sweated in Death Valley, reached the Pacific on the Mexican border. In San Francisco, while watching the sunset from Russian Hill, he decided to return to the orphanage. He boarded a bus but the driver ripped up his ticket.