Edward Whittemore - Quin’s Shanghai Circus

I examined these questions and many others when I was abandoned and left alone. In my solitude I looked for the mysteries that stir the facts of life. I looked but now the wind is rising. The typhoon will be here soon, and mysteries and facts alike will be of no avail when it comes. They are the driftwood on the shore to be found by you or another after the storm has passed. Gather them together if you wish and build a fire on the beach against the night. Watch the smoke rise into the darkness and wonder if those are stars you see up there. Listen to the rumble of the sea then, listen to the waves turn three times and turn a thousand years, listen and let your mind wander.

Father Lamereaux sadly lowered his head. He gripped the horsehair arms of his chair.

Even in the thirteenth century there was often confusion in the capital, which is to say we’ve made a mistake following Christ rather than the Virgin. Without a mother there would be no son and women who have children, even virgins, are seldom bothered by constipation. In the old days this house was filled with cats and there were always fires to watch, the flowers of Tokyo they were called. If we happened to see a flower before a meeting of the Legion, the conversation afterward was always exceptionally spirited.

Turnips. For over two decades nothing but turnips. Half a century in this country. Three-quarters of a century of life.

Father Lamereaux bent his head. His long white hair swung free. A blast of wind shook the house and then there was utter silence. For a minute or two he listened to the silence.

Do you hear it? Do you know it? It is the eye of heaven and we are in it. But there is but a short time to wait, eternity is brief. Soon the wind will be with us again, stronger than before, and the Emperor will pass unrecognized through the byways of his capital, his mark on the gate mistaken for the scratchings of a peasant, the palace a graveyard where his ghost drifts between the stones. There are so many shrines one Emperor cannot visit them all, sooner or later he must retire to his prayer wheels. And now I am afraid there is nothing more this court can do for you. The thirteenth century is coming to an end. Adzhar is gone, Lotmann is gone, I must join them. Our moment is over. The eye of the storm is about to close.

Father Lamereaux stood. His hair streamed around his shoulders.

Quin tried to thank him, but his words were lost in the wind. He reached out, but there was no hand there to take. The old priest’s gaze was fixed on an ancient domain bequeathed to poets and musicians. The door closed as Quin ran up the street looking for shelter.

Father Lamereaux returned to his study. His walls were lined with books. On his desk lay the manuscript he had never begun, the history of his reign, a work so massive there was no way to record it. The Emperor had ruled from his throne for seven hundred years and now his era was over. Time moved in epochs.

A petitioner.

A dwarf staring at the middle of his forehead.

Master, I have closed the shutters. Go down to the cellar and stay there until the typhoon passes.

Father Lamereaux listened to the temple bells tolling the stages of his soul. Certainly he could retire to the pine grove above the sea where he had long ago received instructions in the mysteries. Certainly he could grant her petition if first he resigned himself to imperfection.

Go down, master. Go down. Do it now.

My life, he whispered, has been devoted to the alleviation of suffering. In the years allotted me by Our Lady I have sought no other justification for life.

His face tightened. The scars around his eyes deepened. His cheeks sank, the skin shrank into the bone. He reached out and put both hands around Miya’s neck, strangling her, letting her body fall to the floor.

A window crashed. The front door blew open. He walked slowly down the corridor and paused at the kitchen. It was empty, the Emperor was alone in his palace. Even the princess had fled.

Leaves and branches and earth, the whole world had been set loose in the air. Five thousand people would die in Japan that afternoon and Father Lamereaux was but one of them, a forgotten priest whose kindness had soothed the lives of many.

The wind knocked him down. With the last of his strength, he crawled across the garden to where the moss grew, to where there would be flowers and cats and tombstones for the boys he had loved in cemeteries, where the gong of the wind sounded down through the longest reign in the history of Asia.

His head rested on the moss. He looked up at the sky, stared into the eye of heaven as the thick garden wall came apart, as the prison walls opened and he was crushed piece by piece under the smooth, weathered stones.

There were only two buttons in the private elevator, one marked up and one marked down . The little woman met him when he stepped off on the twenty-fourth floor.

The whole city is at your feet, said Quin. Is Fuji-san always that clear from here?

Only at this time of the year, she said. Just after the typhoon season the air is peculiarly transparent. Distance seems not to count. The rest of the year the mountain is cloudy and mysterious, or dim and mysterious, or invisible and mysterious.

He slipped off his shoes and followed her into a spacious room with tatami on the floor, empty of furniture, bare save for a primitive structure by the window. The Japanese shrine was raised on stilts, the thatched roof slanting sharply up to where the roof beams, two on each end, crossed in the air. The interior of the shrine was hidden by thin straw mats hanging on all four sides.

When I was younger, she said, it puzzled me how that design found its way to Japan. The heavy roof and open sides suggest a tropical climate of rain and heat, a land of monsoons, thus the stilts. Yet Japan is a northern country and mountainous. Why fear coastal floods in the mountains? Why build without walls and foundations when the winters are severe? Why use thatch rather than earth and stone like other northern peoples? The Ainu, the first people on these islands, built quite differently. They fought quite differently as well, on foot with short weapons, which seems suitable to a mountain land. Yet the oldest objects of the Yamato peoples from whom we are descended are clay grave figures that show warriors on horseback with long swords. Horsemen with long swords in a tropical jungle? No. That would have to suggest the plains of Manchuria and Mongolia.

Mama smiled.

Northern yet southern. Our ancestors, after all, are a paradox. The house and the people in it contradict each other. Their three holy symbols were a round disk of polished metal, a curved piece of jade, a sword. The sun and the new moon and the lightning of fate. What plans do you have now?

I leave in a few days on a freighter.

Well, then it is over, whatever you hoped to do.

She was dressed in a black kimono. An emerald hung in the middle of her forehead. She touched the jewel now with a slender finger.

I didn’t know the name of the circus master then.

I didn’t know what became of the son your mother had by the General, nor what became of the son I had by your father. I didn’t know then, but no matter. What has been remains in our emerald world, the jewels of our minds where the circus of the past is never forgotten. The man I knew wanted to control his destiny. But lives cross, the sun and the moon contradict each other, we are enmeshed in a network of doing and feeling. Others become part of us and the pasts of others are beyond us. He sacrificed everything to build his own network of destiny. I met him only once for a few hours, yet it changed my life. Why is that?

He didn’t do it alone, he did it with another. When I went to the warehouse that night I thought my life was over, but when I listened to the words of the circus master I discovered this wasn’t so. An anonymous giant had already returned life to me although I didn’t know it until that moment. But then I knew it and knew that even then I had something to give in return, so I did.