Edward Whittemore - Quin’s Shanghai Circus

The policeman stared at the floor. Didn’t this grinning young fool understand anything at all? It wasn’t a revolver that had made the bulge in the boy’s pocket, it was a slab of grilled meat. He had seen the boy slip the meat off his plate when no one was looking and drop it into his pocket. He had seen him do it and he knew exactly what it meant. More than once he had done the same thing in Siberia, where there was never enough to eat. It meant the boy with the bandaged head had been in prison. He was a criminal. And he had also seen him pick up a bottle of Japanese meat sauce and look at the label with a dull expression in his eyes. The policeman knew what that meant too. The boy with the bandaged head was not only a criminal, he was illiterate.

Of course he’s an American, whispered Hato, grinning. Maybe that frightens you.

The policeman stared at the floor and saw his mother face down in a frozen rice paddy because she was an Ainu with Caucasian blood and the silk market had collapsed in America. He took the magazine in his hands and turned the pages until he came to one without any pictures, a page covered with hundreds of minute Chinese characters. He held the page up in his hands scarred from digging salt in Siberia and tore it into long strips, shredded the strips, let the tiny white pieces flutter over his lap to the floor.

Does that mean you’re with me?

The policeman nodded.

They talked for a while and then Hato left, dreaming of Paris and the funeral movie he would make there. People would come to interview him, they would ask him to give his opinions on television, and he would tell them the truth about America. Tell them everything and never again do calisthenics or march in haiku parades or put up with young women dressed as hags who broke into his room calling him a mother-fucker.

Behind him the policeman sat on his cot staring at snowflakes.

Mama finished painting the nails on her right hand and went on to the left. For days she had been pondering the small gold cross worn by the young man whom Quin had brought with him to her nightclub.

Once Mama had known that cross well. It was the most treasured present the General had ever given her. Later it was stolen in Shanghai while she was under the influence of laudanum, taken from her during one of those evenings spent gazing at the falsely pornographic images projected dimly on the wall by the whirring imagination of a clown.

Kikuchi-Lotmann. Quin. Big Gobi.

What connected these three men? Why had one of them come to possess the General’s gift of love to her?

She knew the names Lotmann and Kikuchi, she knew the name Quin. But Gobi was a desert, a remote place in western China, a forsaken place of sandy wastes. To see what it might teach her she consulted the oldest document on the Gobi that she could find, an apocryphal chronicle written two thousand years ago during the Han dynasty.

A region of sudden sandstorms , read the chronicle, sudden sandstorms and terrifying visions. Rivers disappear overnight, landmarks go with the wind, the sun sinks at midday. A timeless nonexistent land meant to plague the mind with its mirages .

But the most dangerous thing that must be mentioned is the caravans that appear at any moment on the horizon, there to drift uncertainly for minutes or days or years. Now they are near, now far, now just as assuredly they are gone. The camel drivers are aloof and silent, undistinguishable, men of some distant race. But the men they serve, the leaders of the caravans, are truly frightening. They wear odd costumes, their eyes gleam, they come from every corner of the world.

These men, in sum, are the secret agents who have always given the authorities so much to fear. They represent the princes and despots of a thousand lawless regions.

Or is it perhaps that they represent no one at all? Is that why their aspects make us tremble? In any case we know only that this is their meeting place, the unmarked crossroads where they mingle and separate and wander on their way.

As for where they go and why, we cannot be sure of such things. There are no tracks in such a barren waste. The sandstorms blow, the sun sinks, rivers disappear, and their camels are lost in darkness. Therefore the truth must be that the routes of such men are untrace-able, their missions unknowable, their ultimate destinations as invisible as the wind.

If the Son of Heaven is to continue to rule with integrity, we must defend our borders at all costs from such men.

Thus ended the uneasy commentary written two thousand years ago by a Chinese traveler wishing to warn the Sons of Han of the dangers to be found in the desert west of the Central Kingdom. Mama found the allusions evocative but she wanted to know more.

She telephoned the leading Chinese historian in the country, an acquaintance from her early days in the brothel in Kobe. The historian gave her an account of the tribes that had passed through the desert over the last three or four thousand years, a tale of innumerable influxes and exoduses.

Next she called the leading geologist in the country. He compared the landscape of the Gobi to the surface of the moon. Lastly she called Japan’s most famous paleontologist.

Among her many scholarly acquaintances the paleontologist was somewhat special. He had visited her immediately after she arrived in the brothel and had never forgotten the experience, nor had she, for even then he had bizarre tastes having to do with shards and slivers of bone. The paleontologist was very old now and largely deaf, but a hearing aid attached to his telephone made conversation possible.

My dear, he shouted, it’s good to talk to you again after all these years. How long has it been, about half a century? Well, we’ve both come along way since then, my bones tell me so. What can I do for you?

Mama told him. She said she was trying to find some significance in the word Gobi when it was used as a man’s name.

A kind of code word? shouted the paleontologist. Well, as you know, the earth’s climate has changed a bit over the last million years. Something to do with shifts in the magnetic fields of outer space. That causes the poles on earth to shift, which changes the balance of the globe. Every now and then, in other words, the world goes out of whack. Right off its head. Things just aren’t the same anymore. Confusion at the poles, confusion all around. What used to be isn’t, what never was is. Areas get mixed up. A place that was a desert becomes fertile. The fertile place becomes a desert. It’s almost enough to make a man believe in the Book of Changes, but of course old books are intolerably boring.

Well, a million years ago man was just about getting started, so what we surmise from the paleontological evidence is that he wasn’t getting started in the places you might think. Just the opposite, the worst places today being the best places then. Therefore the Gobi was probably one of the original cradles of the race. Where it all began, my work and yours, the origin of man. I suggest you follow that line of reasoning.

And my dear, don’t forget to call again. Fifty years is much too long to wait at our age. Which reminds me, someone mentioned that you were tattooed later on. Was it all over? What kinds of tattoos? Describe the part for me. You know the one I mean.

The shouting paleontologist became obscene. Mama skillfully turned the conversation aside and hung up.

She returned to her dais to prepare for the mudra of contemplation. The origin of man. That’s what the paleontologist had said.

She reflected on the boy who had raped one of her girls in the middle of the floor. Many times in her life she had seen violence, but never violence committed with such an innocent face. She had known then that the boy was a genuine primitive, a child from another age.