Edward Whittemore - Quin’s Shanghai Circus

She crashes to the ground. The spotlight shoots into the air.

An aerial performance. A woman hangs by her knees from a trapeze, a mouthpiece clamped between her teeth. From the mouthpiece dangles another trapeze on which two wiry men, also hanging by their knees, masturbate each other while cursing their female relatives. The woman’s neck muscles bulge even more than expected, for the mouthpiece isn’t the one she generally uses. This mouthpiece has been fitted with a spring that gradually expands in her mouth. Of course she can’t spit it out, nor can she scream. The fellatio comes to an end when the two ejaculating men follow their sperm toward the ring together with the lower half of the woman’s face, her hanging tongue showing where she has been severed at the ears.

These opening acts, meant to set a circus mood, are quickly over. Now the spotlight dips back and forth, leaving the ring in darkness. The audience responds to the darkness by swinging their little red lights.

The flashlights were my father’s idea, miniature red lights on a string. He had devised them after long experience with audiences of children.

A circus ring is continually being darkened to prepare for the next act, and it seems that when a large number of children are gathered together in darkness they have a irresistible urge to exert themselves. They shriek, they tear off their clothes, they punch and kick each other and try to urinate on someone’s face.

My father introduced the little red lights so the children could amuse themselves when the hall was dark. Then he noticed that the parents of the children also enjoyed swinging the lights. Subsequently he never gave a performance without passing around the little red lights to everyone.

Although sophisticated and wealthy, the Shanghai audience was the same as any other when it came to darkness. While an act was under way they cracked and peeled their shrimps, giggled, nudged one another, and congratulated themselves. But the moment the act ended they desperately swung their little red lights.

A sense of community, perhaps, in that vast and gloomy warehouse?

There was always an undercurrent of fear, you see, in the old Shanghai, fear of a special kind. The city hung by the sea, a dot of land under international control. Beyond it stretched all of China and more, all of Asia. Tens of thousands of miles of interminable mountains and deserts. Tens of millions of nameless people babbling in unknown tongues. Swarming river valleys and uninhabitable mountain ranges. Caravan trails spiraling back into antiquity.

Who were these bewildering peoples? What esoteric fantasies might be the heritage of tribes that had wandered for millennia on the byways of unrecorded languages?

A few travelers had always explored these ancient routes. Learned Arabs, gentle Nestorians, adventurous Greeks. Some even reached the Pacific and lived to pass on their tales to the curious. But the stories they told only hinted at the mysteries to be found out there, the dragon bones of lost and future worlds, the illusions of mystics and madmen.

Shanghai stood on the edge of this hinterland. There were only a few people there, relatively speaking, with only a few days or weeks to live. To them this precarious existence on the edge of China had become man’s precarious existence on the edge of sanity. That’s what I meant when I said that Shanghai, then, was not only a state of mind but an actual part of mind. Within the narrow bounds of the city, people explored depravity, to be sure, but perhaps that was only because the wastes that lay beyond were too vast to contemplate.

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.