Edward Whittemore - Quin’s Shanghai Circus

The Living Room.

It was silly. Nothing made any sense anymore. Palaces didn’t have living rooms. Palaces were supposed to be up in the sky.

He was even more disappointed when they went into a small, dark room, smaller than the one in Yokohama, lacking a jukebox. They sat down in an alcove hidden behind palm trees. A bucket of ice was brought with a bottle in it. Big Gobi tasted the bubbly ginger ale and found it bitter. The tall, flat glasses held only a mouthful.

He was lonely. An old woman with a silly green jewel in the middle of her forehead came and sat down beside Quin. Was that Quin’s idea of a princess? While they talked he peeked between the palm trees. It was dark out there. Where was everyone?

The old woman left and Quin went with her, saying he would be back in a few minutes. Big Gobi shrugged. He didn’t care.

He finished the bottle of ginger ale thinking about the girl in Yokohama who had jewels on her slippers, not on her forehead. He tried washing and drying his hands, but that didn’t help either. Another bottle came. He drank some more.

All at once a beautiful girl was sitting down beside him, a young girl with black hair to her waist, a princess. She was wearing an evening dress and stroking his arm. The only girl who had ever done that before was the nurse in the army when she gave him water injections. Instinctively he jerked his arm away.

Her hand fell on his knee. She giggled and went on stroking him.

Whatever you want, said her lovely eyes. I love your knee. I love all of you.

Big Gobi suddenly laughed. He was happy. This princess was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen and she was smiling at him, admiring him, loving him.

He began to talk, he couldn’t help it. He told her about the orphanage and oysters and the army and the bus trip and the seagull soup on the freighter and running away from the seagulls through a blizzard. He confessed his secrets, all but one of them, and still she smiled at him, loved him, urged him to go on.

Her hand slipped up to his thigh.

Big Gobi was smiling too, giggling, pouring himself more ginger ale. The princess was beautiful, life in the palace was beautiful. She loved him, why not tell her everything? She would understand about the accident in the freezer locker.

She blew in his ear. Her hand moved over and touched him right there, stroked him right there. Big Gobi took the eye out of his pocket so that he wouldn’t lose control.

It all happened quickly. She pulled her hand away, her smile was gone, her face a mixture of wonder and doubt. She was staring at his hand on the table, at the eye buried in his palm. The eye was staring back at her, reflecting the dim light in the alcove. Big Gobi didn’t want her to take her hand away and he didn’t want to stop talking. He wanted to tell her about the tuna fish and the accident with the foreman before it was too late.

He pulled her toward him, she pulled away. She said something he didn’t understand and her dress ripped. She screamed.

The jukebox in Yokohama, the jewels, the beach, oysters. Colored lights went off in Big Gobi’s head. What was that eye doing in his hand? Was it really an eye or was it an oyster?

He pushed it into his mouth. Swallowed it.

The girl shrieked. He pulled her again and her dress tore, the jigglies were right in front of him. He squeezed the jigglies, squeezed himself, got his trousers down as the two of them crashed backward through the palm trees into the middle of the room. Waiters tried to hold his arms and legs, the sumo wrestler’s mallet landed on his head but Big Gobi went on pumping. The mallet rose in the air a second time.

There was no way of knowing whether the second blow from that heavy weapon, by itself, would have stopped him. In any case his orgasm had already begun before the mallet fell. By the time it struck him he was spent, limp, relaxed. The mallet grazed his ear and he rolled over on his back, snoring, a smile on his face, one arm tucked underneath the naked girl.

He awoke on a landing near the street, his ear bandaged, Quin standing over him. He wanted to tell Quin that it had been nobody’s fault. Not hers for touching him right there where a princess touches you when she loves you. Not his for taking out the eye because he loved her and didn’t want an accident to happen at the table. No one was to blame. Everything had happened out of love.

Big Gobi thought of all the things he wanted to say, but only the same silly words kept coming out.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry, Quin.

Sorry.

Terribly sorry.

He tried to say more and couldn’t, stammered, repeated himself. And then Quin turned on him.

Hold your tongue , he said.

Big Gobi closed his eyes. He didn’t say anything after that because he had heard that voice before. It was the kind of voice a cook on a freighter used, or a nurse in the army, or a bus driver when he took your ticket and tore it up.

Just destroyed it, just like that, and threw it away not caring that you were all alone and had nowhere to go without a ticket.

It was wrong, Big Gobi knew it was wrong. Quin was like a brother to him, but even Quin got angry because he could never say what he wanted to say, could never open his heart and love people the way he wanted to love them, touch them the way he wanted to touch them without some terrible accident happening. Perhaps if he’d told Quin long ago about the mistake with the foreman and the tuna fish, he might have understood this time. But he hadn’t told him then and now it was too late. It was all wrong and no one was to blame, but it was too late.

Hold your tongue.

Big Gobi closed his eyes. Those were the last words that would ever cause him pain for when they sank into him a gate clanged shut behind them, a palace gate that would never open again. He tried to live in a world that was strange and frightening, tried to call it silly, tried to pretend he could live the way other people lived. But the gestures had always been clumsy, the acting artless, a jester with a serious face, a buffoon without a smile. Although he was as kind and lonely as a clown, in the end no one laughed.

Thereafter he might walk after Quin, the brother, down this street or that from the past, through the mythical lost cities of Shanghai and Tokyo and there find his mother or father without knowing it, answering questions that went unheard because the dream was gone, because the child within him had fled to the safety of that changeless inner kingdom where neither pain nor insult could be found, nothing in fact but the silent palace where the prince who might have been sat alone in his cell, beyond hope or sadness, patiently waiting for death.

Each morning they had the same conversation when Big Gobi came into the living room and sat down with his hands in his lap, there to remain for the rest of the day.

How’s the ear, Gobes?

The ear’s fine.

Bandage too tight?

The bandage’s fine.

Look, I’m sorry I spoke to you that way, I didn’t mean it. I just got angry that something like that had to happen in Mama’s place.

Anger’s fine. That Mama’s fine. What happened’s fine.

Quin nodded to himself and went into the kitchen, or outside to walk, or back into the bedroom to stare at the floor. Somehow he knew he had to get through to Big Gobi, he had to break his trance. In the end, not knowing how it might help, he decided to take him along to the meeting with the gangster Kikuchi-Lotmann.

Later that evening on the houseboat with Kikuchi-Lotmann would remind him of another meeting on a houseboat, the one Mama had failed to mention in her first conversation with him, the episode that had taken place in Shanghai eight years before she arrived there, the evening when Baron Kikuchi had embraced his convictions and agreed to supply the plans of the General Staff of the Imperial Army to the engaging husband of his former mistress, a man named Quin.