Quin’s Shanghai Circus

Nichiren

No, they will not believe you but you must tell them the truth all the same. You must say that once a man dreamed a wind would come, he dreamed it and willed it, and because he did the wind came.

—The monk Nichiren speaking to his disciples after he destroyed the fleet of Kublai Khan

The day before his ship sailed Quin received a postcard at his hotel across from Tokyo station. The postmark showed that it had been sent to his old address at the time of Big Gobi’s funeral. There was a picture of a fishing village, an illegible message, and a scrawled signature.

Geraty.

Quin asked about the village and was told it was three hours away by train, on the coast south of Kamakura. For weeks he had been trying to find Geraty, but the answer everywhere was the same. No one had seen the giant with the bulging eyes since early in the summer. It was assumed that he had either died or left Tokyo.

There was only one train to the village and it left in a few minutes. Another returned late at night. Quin ran across the street to the station and found the train just as it was beginning to move.

They reached the tiny village early in the afternoon. Quin went first to the police box on the square. After that he intended to try the post office, the inn, lastly the shops that sold horseradish.

The policeman seemed to understand a few words of English. Quin used his hands to describe his man.

A foreigner. Also an American but much taller, much fatter. A long, filthy overcoat, a black hat pulled down to the ears. Layers of sweaters and a swath of red flannel at the neck. Alcohol. Horseradish. Head shaved, white stubble. Purple veins in the face. A gigantic nose, sacks for arms. A belly this far out. Eyes a skull could not hold.

The policeman watched him politely. When Quin finished he asked questions with his hands and his few words of English.

Huge? Yes, he understood.

Whiskey? Sake? He frowned. Impossible.

Prominent eyes? He smiled. Certainly.

A shaved head? The policeman looked confused.

An overcoat? No, nothing like that.

A hat? A black hat? Nobody wore hats anymore, not even foreigners.

Layers of sweaters? A red scarf? A hat like that and an overcoat that big?

The policeman hid his smile. Not even an American would dress so strangely. For a moment he had thought he knew whom they were talking about but obviously it wasn’t the same person. He shook his head. Unfortunately he couldn’t help.

Geraty, said Quin. Ger-a-ty. He must have been here.

Suddenly the policeman’s face was serious. The word came out with a hiss.

Galatiiii?

That’s him, said Quin. Was he here?

The policeman laughed. He clapped his hands three times.

Galatiiii, he hissed triumphantly.

He lowered his eyes solemnly.

Galati-ti-ti, he whispered, rocking back and forth as he repeated the name. The first time he had said it with his head thrown back, smiling. The second time he pronounced the syllables respectfully with his head bowed.

Where? said Quin. Where?

The policeman pointed toward the square. He waved his hand for Quin to follow and started down a narrow street that led to the waterfront. There were a few small piers with fishing boats clustered around them. Although it was a cool October day the shops along the harbor were open to the sun. The policeman marched stiffly along the quay swinging his arms.

Galatiiii, he chanted. Galati-ti-ti.

A group of children playing in the street dropped their ball and ran up behind Quin. An elderly crone, her back bent into a question mark by a lifetime of planting rice, hobbled up to him and clutched his sleeve. She tugged, grinned, kept pace with him over the cobblestones tapping her cane. Women came out of the shops and fishermen left their nets to join the procession.

Galatiiii, hissed the policeman.

Galati-ti-ti, sang the marching crowd.

The procession stretched the length of the waterfront. First came the strutting policeman, then Quin with the dwarf hanging from his sleeve, the children, the fishermen and their wives and mothers.

They left the harbor and followed a road along the shore. Ahead lay a high, rocky point, perhaps a half-mile away, that formed the bay of the village. The point ended in pine trees and cliffs. The sandy road became an uphill path.

Someone had brought a crude set of chimes. Someone else had brought a drum. The chimes clanged and the drum boomed as they climbed through the rice paddies into a pine grove, along a ledge above the sea, through a defile in the rocks that led to an open clearing. Two hundred feet away a small Japanese house stood on the very edge of the promontory.

The policeman waited until the entire procession had wound through the rocks and entered the field. When everyone was standing along the fringe of the forest he bowed his head and clapped three times.

Galatiiii, he shouted.

Galati-ti-ti, chanted the congregation.

The policeman turned and went to stand with the rest of the crowd. The dwarf gave Quin’s sleeve a final tug and hobbled off on her cane. The crowd waited. Quin was alone in the middle of the clearing.

At last the door to the little house opened. A huge figure dressed in kimono wallowed out into the sun. He was enormous, his white hair long and silky. He smiled and benignly raised his arms. The multitude bowed.

Three claps from the giant. One hand went up, the forefinger and middle finger pointing skyward, the medicine and little fingers held down by the thumb to make the pillar and the circle, the symbol of life, the sign of the preacher.

A deep and resonant prayer in Japanese, a short sermon, a rousing benediction. Three loud claps again to end the ceremony. The crowd laughed happily.

Galatiiii, whispered a reverent voice.

Galati-ti-ti, shouted the multitude.

Chimes tinkled, the drum struck a beat. The villagers began to file out of the clearing, the old men rocking on the even ground, the women cackling noisily, the children pushing and pulling, the ancient dwarf rattling the stones with her cane. Quin stared at the huge fat man in kimono.

Buffalo. What in God’s name is going on here?

The giant tossed his head, his hair flew, he burst into laughter. Tears ran down his face, he choked, his massive belly heaved up and down. He howled and his feet broke into a clumsy dance that carried him across the clearing, an enormous Buddha prancing in the afternoon sun. He crashed into the trees and came thundering back grunting and wheezing, gurgling, spinning in circles. He staggered, caught himself, hiccuped.

In God’s name, he moaned. That’s what you said, nephew, don’t deny it. That’s what you said, and as it happens the work that goes on here is no more and no less.

They sat on the narrow terrace of the house, the sea breaking on the cliff a hundred feet below. Behind Geraty lay the bay, the harbor, on the far side the fishing village.

He was wearing a formal black kimono and the short black jacket that went with it. A layer of immaculate white undergarments showed at his chest. The pock-marks had all but disappeared, his eyes no longer bulged from his head. He was heavier than ever, but his deeply tanned face and long, flowing hair gave him a robust appearance. A seagull glided over the house and dipped down the cliff. Geraty followed its flight.

Buffalo. Why did you really walk into the bar that night in the Bronx?

Geraty stirred. He turned away from the sea and gazed at Quin.

Because of my mother. Because I hated to think of her being forgotten after the way she died.

How did she die?

In more agony than you’ll ever see. We watched her. The old man insisted she be sterilized and took her to a quack doctor. He and the quack had some drinks and by the time the quack opened her up he was drunk. Instead of tying the fallopian tubes he tied a part of the intestines. She lasted three days.

How old was Maeve?

Eight. Only eight, saints preserve us. There were just the two of us, and I was old enough to take it but she wasn’t.

What happened to her?

A couple of years later the old man was locking up the bar one night. Drunk? Stinking as usual. He saw a light in the pool hall across the street and let himself in the back door to see what was going on. What was going on was three of his customers fucking Maeve on a pool table. He laid them out and then beat her until she was unconscious. The next day, when he saw what her face looked like, he locked himself in the cellar with a case of gin and swallowed the key. Planned to starve himself to death but it was winter, too cold for him down there. He died in that cellar all right, but not the way he expected. He ruptured his bowels digging for the key.

Then what? The war?

The war, the Great War. Eddy Quin signs up to be a hero and comes home with his leg full of shrapnel. I didn’t see much of him then, I was traveling for a drug company.

How did Maeve get to Shanghai?

Delicate fingers. Somehow she got mixed up with an Indian after the war who had delicate fingers. He was passing himself off as a Hindu prince fighting for the motherland. He talked her into joining the cause and coming back to India with him, but when they got there it turned out the prince’s father was a half-caste, mostly white, a butcher who made his living slaughtering sacred cows and selling the beef to the English. Maeve got back on the freighter and ran out of money in Shanghai.

Where she met Adzhar?

Where she met Adzhar. She was hysterical and conceited but she appealed to men, some men, young ones who liked her looks or older ones who liked the way she believed in things, tried to believe in things. Adzhar took care of her and got her going, even bought her a bookstore so she could make a living. If he hadn’t been so kind, maybe she would have grown up and stopped talking about causes and heroes with delicate fingers. Adzhar’s friends used to come to the bookstore, revolutionary exiles most of them. One of them was a young man he’d recruited back in Paris when he was still working for Trotsky, the hero with the shrapnel in his leg who used to play stickball with me as a kid. Maeve hadn’t known him before really, she was too young, but she got to know him then.

Did he tell you what he was doing?

No, she did. She told me all about it and how she was helping him, she was proud of that. A year or two after she went to Shanghai, there were some investigations in the drug business in the States and I had to get out of the country. I went to Canada, and the only job I could find was with a company that had just decided there was a fortune to be made peddling leprosy drugs in Asia. Leprosy drugs? For some reason they thought Asia was full of lepers waiting to buy an American cure. But I needed credentials, so I took the job and got sent to Tokyo. A little later Maeve showed up with the baby she’d had by Kikuchi. She told me all the wonderful things she was doing for the world and then she mentioned the baby. She wanted to get rid of it and asked me to help. I went to Lamereaux.

Did he know who the father was?

Of course. I told him.

Well, when he took the child to Lotmann to raise, did he tell Lotmann who the father was?

No. Buddhist custom doesn’t work that way. You’re not supposed to know who the child belongs to. You take it as an act of charity.

One of them was a Catholic priest and one of them was a Jewish rabbi. What’s Buddhist custom got to do with it?

Japan. They were both living in Japan.

I got it, buffalo. Charity. That’s the word, isn’t it? Well, that brings us up to the Gobi network and the end of the Gobi network. You weren’t working then, were you? During the eight years the net was running?

No, I had money saved from the States.

Sure you did. Sure.

Quin sat a minute or two in silence. When he got to his feet he moved slowly. It was something he hadn’t done in a long time, measuring that kind of distance. He pushed his left shoulder out and swung from far back, putting all his weight behind the fist.

He caught Geraty full in the face. Geraty went over, toppled backward, sprawled on his back across the terrace. Blood ran from his nose and mouth. Quin took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it around his hand. He was shaking.

Like it, buffalo? Feel right? That was for a guy with a gimp leg who tried to make it and went crazy and a woman who tried to make it and took a high dive. And a broken-down Jesuit and a girl who was working as a whore as a kid and your fucking Marco Polo and your fucking Elijah and all those other poor fucking ticket-buyers who were trying to do something, anything, what does it matter, while you were loping around the edges of the circus whacked out on booze and horseradish, doing your jackal number on booze and horseradish, sneezing and scratching and whacked out in your damn fake costumes playing the impostor. But most of all, buffalo, it’s for Little Gobi, let’s call him that, not Big but Little, a guy who never tried to do anything at all and never hurt anyone. Those are people you’re talking about, don’t you know that? So she was conceited and hysterical and he thought he was going to be a hero, so fucking what? What the hell do you think you’ve done with your life? The gimp finds out he’s not a hero and his woman finds out she’s made a mess of it, the General tries and gets strung out and Lamereaux tries and gets strung out, and Little Gobi does nothing at all and gets his head knocked in and what the hell are you doing all that time? You didn’t do what Lamereaux did or what the General did or the gimp and his woman, you just sat on your ass doing nothing, not trying, doing nothing at all. You make me sick, buffalo. You and your shit. You and your liar’s dice. You and your arrogance and your stench and your fat ass and your speeches and your saints and your lies. You talk about other people after the way you’ve lived? Sitting on top of that kind of garbage? Just where do you get off thinking you can do something like that? Who the fuck do you think you are, going around faking everything in sight? A clown playing God?

Geraty, flat on his back, hiccuped. He licked his lips and rubbed the blood off his nose. He tried to raise himself on an elbow.

Quin spat on him.

Say it, you slobbering fat man. Say it.

No.

No what?

Nothing.

What do you mean, nothing?

I’m sorry, nephew. I’m sorry about that.

You’re damn right you’re sorry. You’re the sorriest bag of secret shit I’ve ever seen.

No, that’s not it, nephew. You don’t understand. I’m not sorry that way, I’m sorry you can’t have an answer. I’m sorry your questions don’t make any sense.

What the hell, you must have something to say for yourself.

No.

Nothing?

Nothing.

What do you mean, nothing? Nothing at all? Just nothing? You live sixty-five years and you’re noplace? You’ve got nothing to say? Not a damn thing?

No.

Why the fuck not?

Because a toad and a uterus have the same shape. It’s too early now, but when you’re a little older take a look at the skin on the back of your hands. Take a look at the pan of gray water after you wash your hair.

What are you trying to say, buffalo?

I’ll tell you. First I have something to give you.

Geraty groaned. He pulled in his arms and legs, struggled to get to his feet. A moment later he was lumbering into the house and returning with a black bowler hat. He handed it to Quin, who spun around and scaled it out over the sea. The hat rose on a gust of wind, stopped, slipped down the cliff to the waves with a swarm of seagulls chasing it. Quin rocked back and forth nodding to himself.

Sit down, ordered Geraty.

What?

I said sit down.

Quin sat down. His hand hurt. He was still shaking, but what bothered him most was that Geraty had remained so calm. His uncle jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

That’s a fishing village.

I know what the hell it is.

You do, do you? Then you know O-bon. You know Nichiren.

Quin said nothing.

What? Do you?

No.

You mean you didn’t learn everything there was to know in that Bronx bar of yours? Well, listen to me then. Fishing nets are spread and mended, storms and tides come and go. That’s the way it is here most of the year, that’s all people think about because that’s all they have to think about. But once a year it’s different. In midsummer there’s a day known as O-bon, the Festival of the Dead, a time of the moon when ghosts come back to the world they knew. The villagers welcome them with rice and sake, they rejoice, for the ghosts are lost friends and relatives. They talk together, reminisce, the day passes. All goes well until nightfall and then not a light shows in the village. Why? Because the ghosts are in that darkness. They’re there and they want to stay there. They don’t want to leave.

The villagers gather on the shore. The young men raise the shrine on their backs and carry it out into the water. The old men launch small paper boats and set them afire, set them adrift so they can carry away the restless memories.

The shrine begins to shake violently. The spirits have turned away from the flimsy craft they have been offered. They would rather linger in the village, in the darkness of the homes they once knew as their own. Not willingly will they submit themselves again to the deep.

In front of the shrine stands a man immersed in water to his chest, an intercessor who must face the sea and demand a domain for the living with a voice that can overcome the dirge of ten thousand suffering souls. This voice must be stronger than the wails of the dead, louder than the wind, more insistent than the wishes of all the ghosts ever known to the men and women of this village. He must find that voice and speak with it, and when he does it must prevail.

Geraty spread wide his arms. He fixed his gaze on a seagull suspended in the air. A powerful, monotonous chant rose from the terrace, an unintelligible Buddhist incantation that steadily gathered in force and rhythm. The pines creaked, the breakers hummed. Abruptly the chant ended and the seagull broke free on the wind.

Geraty dropped his arms to his sides.

What is done is undone, he whispered. The shrine no longer trembles on the backs of the young men. The burning boats cast adrift by the old men float away on the dark waters. The dead sleep, the living set their sails and fish their seas. The dangerous rite is over.

And Nichiren? An unknown monk who lived in the thirteenth century. Who lived alone and unnoticed in a corner of these islands at a time when a Prince of princes ruled in Asia, a Prince of all the tribes, a warrior horseman so fearless and unbending his was the will of the desert itself.

One day the Prince surveyed his empire and decided these few small islands off the coast of Asia should be conquered, not because they would enrich him but for the sake of the symmetry of his maps.

So Kublai Khan commanded that a fleet be built, a fleet to carry one hundred thousand of his finest horsemen. Who but a man of the desert would build the greatest fleet in history for the sake of symmetry?

In Japan there is no hope of combating the army of the largest empire the world has ever known. The Emperor retires to compose a poem, his Generals polish their swords and dictate love letters. Rice dealers bury gold, peasants give birth and die, ladies sigh over their wardrobes.

A nameless monk tirelessly trudges the dusty road toward the south, toward the shore where the unconquerable Khan’s horsemen will begin their conquest.

The afternoon comes when the fleet appears on the horizon. Briefly the Japanese forces group and regroup before scattering. The Generals honorably commit suicide. The Emperor observes sunset from his temple in the mountains. Fires and looting break out in the capital. The shoreline is deserted. For many miles inland the countryside is deserted.

Except for one man, one figure toiling through the last light of day. It is well after dark before he reaches the beach, before he stumbles across the sands and sits down by the water, the first time he has rested in many days. But now he does not rest. He lays his hands in his lap and bows his head, a small man invisible in the gloom facing a forest of masts.

In the deep of night a wind comes. The ships tug at their anchors and the wind shapes itself, grows in fury and in nightmare until it becomes the intolerable world given birth by one man’s mind.

In the morning the sky is clear, the horizon empty. Once more the sea is a desert. A divine wind, a kamikaze, has destroyed utterly the magnificent fleet of Kublai Khan and all his magnificent horsemen.

Years later Nichiren’s disciples ask him how they can ever explain such a miracle. They will not believe us, say the disciples.

No, they will not, answers Nichiren, but you must tell them the truth all the same. You must say that once a man dreamed a wind would come, he dreamed it and willed it, and because he did the wind came.

Winter, said Geraty. Last winter, perhaps?

The man in question is no longer young. In fact he’s old, he’s tired. He has bad habits and he’s poor. In the course of sixty-five years of lying and cheating and stealing he has accrued only two things of value, both gifts from the dragon. One is a small gold cross. The other is a collection of rare manuscripts in translation.

The cross was taken from a woman who was falling under its weight. That was in Shanghai before the war.

The collection of manuscripts he found in the Chinese wing of the warehouse where the Kempeitai kept its files. One night he organized a convoy of trucks to carry the manuscripts away for safekeeping, then he set fire to the wing. That was in Tokyo right after the war.

Let twenty years go by. Let them simply pass.

It is winter. Last winter or one like it. Our man puts two bottles of Irish whiskey in a valise and takes the train to Kamakura. He walks to a certain beach and sits down on the sand.

Why? To remember an evening long ago when he shared two bottles of Irish whiskey with a forgotten No actor? To recall the four people who once held a picnic on this beach?

Perhaps. In any case he sits down on the sand and opens the first bottle.

An hour goes by, or two hours, or less than an hour. Our man is watching the waves and takes no notice of time. From somewhere in the darkness a stranger appears and sits down. He accepts a drink, mutters, stares vacantly at the stars. After a while he begins to talk.

He mentions mulberry trees, pine groves, giant steps that lead nowhere, blackjacks and urinal candy, a face eaten by a dog, mushrooms, a night in Nanking.

Our man listens to this phantasmagoria and is appalled. For He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. Must the chaos of the world be infinite? Is this voice from the waves recounting a history of the twentieth century? The thirteenth century? A century that lies a million years in the past?

The stranger is a tiny man. Is it the movement of his hands? His eyes? The way he holds his head?

For some reason our man is reminded of the little woman in Shanghai. He thinks of her, and all at once he knows this little man and that little woman are related. Why? How? There’s no explanation, no way to comprehend it. They are, that’s all.

The stranger drinks, he talks, he stares at the stars. Just before dawn he falls asleep, naked except for a towel over his loins. It seems that as he talked he felt compelled to take off his clothes. Our man quietly gets to his feet and leaves, but not empty-handed. No, he takes the stranger’s greatcoat with him because he has made a decision. Two decisions.

First, he will take the collection of manuscripts to America and sell them for a large amount of money so that he can live his last days in peace.

Second, he will return the small gold cross to its rightful owner.

Both actions are for the same purpose. He wants to assure himself that the insane tale told by the stranger on the beach won’t end the way it began. He wants to prove to himself that even an account of history as grotesque as that can have some small measure of order behind it. Above all he wants to believe there has been some meaning in the pathetic parade of events and people he calls his life.

He acts. He goes to America and the collection is confiscated. It’s taken away from him but those who take it, who store it in a New York warehouse, don’t realize what they have is useless. Useless because he has kept the key, the code book to the annotations, the dragon’s secret, the keys to the kingdom.

Failure? No, total disaster. He’s sick and old and there’s no way he can support himself now. He came to New York thinking he was a rich man, rich at the end of life, but the rich He hath sent empty away.

Our man collapses in a hostel for vagrant alcoholics. Three days later he staggers north to return the small gold cross to its rightful owner. The day he arrives back in New York happens to be the feast day of the saint for whom his mother is named, Brigid. He goes back to the neighborhood where he grew up. He staggers into the bar once owned by and named for his father, another Eddy, like all bartenders a profane confessor. After rolling the dice he boards a freighter and returns to Japan. In his pocket is the secret code book, all he has left.

Summer.

A summer evening. Last summer or one like it. Drunk, dazed from horseradish, our man finds himself lying on his back in a vacant lot in Tokyo, in a slum, on sand that is damp because he has come to rest in a gigantic urinal along with other scavenging alcoholics. The men in the urinal are dying, they’re all dying, and before the night is over they’ll be robbed of all they have. What else can he do but sleep and forget? He sleeps.

Sleeps and snores and raves, for of course he can’t forget yet, the time hasn’t come, he must sink lower still. While he sleeps fitfully a horde of faces hovers over him, crowds around him in the urinal. All the experiences he has known in forty years in the Orient come back to him.

In his dream he begins to visit these people, apparently to renew old friendships and share a mild anecdote or two in order to recall the nostalgia of other days, actually to beg something from them that will keep him alive.

For now it’s come down to that. He has no excuse for living anymore. Either he finds an excuse or he’s finished.

He makes a list and starts at the top of the list. That night and every night over the summer he lies on the damp sand of the urinal working his way down the list of names and faces’ When he meets one of these people he smiles pleasantly. He nods at their eccentricities, ingratiates himself in whatever manner seems appropriate, apologizes, agrees enthusiastically with everything they have ever done.

He flatters them, admires them, mentions their goodness and their strength, their tenderness, their humility. He invokes the saints in praise of them. He grins. He wrings his hands hopefully.

Thinking it might amuse them, he shuffles his feet in a little dance. He asks for pity, begs for it.

He gets down on his knees and cries, sobs, admits to all acts real and imagined. He takes off his clothes and displays himself naked so they will see he is hiding nothing. He covers his face with his hands and peeks between the fingers.

Ridiculous. Is anyone going to be fooled by this absurd performance?

Of course not. There’s no chance of it and he knows it, but he does it anyway because his pride is gone. Gone. He’s desperate to find an excuse for living.

He snatches up the articles they discard. No matter how worthless they are, he snatches them up and presses them to his chest, clutches them, squeezes them with his thumbs, licks them, wets them with his tears, buries them in his greatcoat.

A greatcoat stuffed with the debris of life.

There’s a glass paperweight meant to resemble jade, a forged Canadian passport and two forged Belgian passports, a screw-top jar, the Litany of the Saints, a battered movie projector, a secret-bag, layers of sweaters, a cache of animal husbandry documentaries made during the early days of the Russian Revolution, a piece of red flannel tied with string, two bottles of Irish whiskey, a journey that goes south and west from Tokyo and pauses for a snooze in the mountains of the Philippines before returning to Tokyo, a spotlight, an exhibition, the depraved legacy locked behind the smile of the everyday man in kimono, a pushcart, steam rising from a pan of boiling turnips.

Victorian horsehair chairs, cannons captured in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, a gentle smile, three gas masks, bamboo tubes, flowers of Tokyo, evaporating doorways, materializing cemeteries, midnight tombstones, dead cats, bartered rice, buggered pickles, an autograph, a vegetarian diet that excludes honey and eggs, a coat that buttons the wrong way, cracked No masks and torn No costumes, a piss in the moss, the kimono of the princess, a manuscript never begun, a complete index to the manuscript that therefore lists nothing, again two bottles of Irish whiskey, claws crushing the heads of rodents, turnips again, nothing but turnips for nearly a quarter of a century, a reign that lasts seven hundred years, a collapsed garden wall.

A tea bowl turned three times, a game of Go, koto music, a wall of rotting Cossack horses, a glass eye, headaches, a ball of fluff, a container of ether, a houseboat in Shanghai, a monk, a mirror in a Mukden toilet, the third bottle of Irish whiskey, a fire in Nanking.

A limp, a megaphone and whip and frock coat, again three gas masks, again a spotlight, a ring and a bed, the one-eyed tomb of Semarang and the sure-footed vine of Mindanao, plump shrimp tails, the highwire, little red swinging lights, sawdust, tubas, the shadowy juggler with his torches, the wastes of central Asia.

A pool table, delicate fingers, a sudden laugh, again a ring and a bed, the highbar, the triple somersault.

Cigars and computers and salad dressings, reports, mixed Mongolian grills, steel mills in Borneo, new governments in South America, massage parlors in Africa, bagels and smoked salmon, folding camp chairs, an endless procession of black limousines, a houseboat in Tokyo, pink gin, fogged glasses, neckties, haiku marching music, once more the megaphone and whip and frock coat.

A tattoo of a dragon, sauce flavored with ambergris and phosphorite, the small lamp of a battered movie projector, a photograph superimposed upon another, the fist of knowledge, oysters, laudanum, a pagoda deep in the ground, a mirror in a shrine high above the city.

More oysters, another glass eye but this one from the Boston waterfront, a nurse with a hypodermic of water, a bus ticket good for thirty days’ travel in the United States, seagull soup, another glass paperweight, a life preserver, a jukebox with colored lights, jigglies, frozen tuna fish, a television set, a hunk of rotting meat, a beach by the sea.

Movie magazines and epileptic fits, gloves and hairpieces and empty lipstick tubes, false sideburns and a false moustache, a chow mein whore, shoeboxes.

Korean latrines, icy Manchurian cellars, familiar smells, a breakwater that leads to the dark waters of the bay.

A shoemaker’s son at a shoemaker’s bench, Lapp proverbs and Malabar peppercorns, high hogs, a final three gas masks, a final transformation, love poems in all the languages of the world, a final bottle of iced vodka, a final jar of iced caviar, a final bath in the morning, a final erection at midnight.

And another koto, another gentle smile, another hypodermic but this one for insulin, the Talmud in Japanese, a black spot in the garden.

An end.

The day finally comes when there are no names left on his list, no debris left in his life. He is empty, he has picked himself clean.

He empties out the pockets of his greatcoat and finds only the dragon’s code book, his last possession, that small notebook wherein the alchemist Adzhar recorded the ultimate secrets of a treatise on love. When he has returned this to its rightful owner, as he did with the cross, he will be ready to die.

Now Adzhar has been gone for many years, but there was a Japanese who knew him well, who was a close friend and will certainly receive the code book in his name. Our man is so poor he can’t take the train to Kamakura, he has to walk. Thousands witness this hulking bundle of rags slowly making his way south down the highway. He walks and walks, each step a torment, and at last reaches the town, finds the house, learns to his dismay that Rabbi Lotmann has been dead for twenty years, killed in a fire bomb raid at the end of the war.

A fire bomb raid in Kamakura? Impossible. Some unique fate existed here, perhaps still exists here.

Vague recollections. Dim intimations.

Our man is too exhausted to think clearly. He’s delirious from lack of food and the craving of his powerful addiction. The housekeeper explains the nature of the rabbi’s death and also explains that the house is being maintained as a shrine in perpetuity by the dead man’s adopted son, an operator who is not only the richest gangster in greater east Asia but the third richest gangster in the world.

Weak from the long walk, raving in a whisper, our man faints in the doorway. The housekeeper rushes away to buy smelling salts. After she leaves, almost at once, our man curiously regains consciousness and lets himself into the house.

He is amazed or perhaps not amazed to find the living room filled with heavy silver objects. There is a large menorah, a silver-embossed Haggadah, a silver-embossed siddur, a silver-plated tallith, a silver-plated tsistsis, an unusual tvillin made of silver rather than wood and leather, a heavy solid silver plaque engraved with the legend mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

What is to be done? Is silver any longer of use to a man who has ascended to heaven in a whirlwind?

Quickly our man gathers up all the silver objects he can lay his hands on and stuffs them into a sack. As payment he leaves behind in a prominent place the secret code book, the keys to the kingdom. They belong to Elijah because he has lived a life that will turn the lock, lived so meekly his push will swing wide the gate.

The sack of loot on his back, our man opens the front door.

A memory.

The holy man whose altar he has desecrated was a diabetic. A diabetic? Dimly there stirs in his tired brain scenes he has witnessed in a locked, shuttered room in Shanghai, even more remote scenes witnessed on rooftops in the Bronx. He makes his way to the medicine cabinet and finds there what he is looking for, the large hypodermic needle used by the rabbi for injecting insulin. He has recalled that before Elijah ascended to heaven he passed on his mantle to his successor.

This then will be the mantle our man receives from the prophet. A hypodermic needle.

He flees. He staggers into the nearest pawnshop and stumbles into the back room, there to empty out his sack. His loathing for what he has done is so great he will accept no more than a ten-thousandth part of the real value of the heavy silver. He leaves sack and silver behind and runs from the pawnshop with his miserable fist of coins.

He buys a cheap valise and stuffs it with bottles of cheap gin. At the railroad station he throws down his few remaining coins and says he wants a ticket down the coast. He will go as far as those coins will take him.

It’s over now and he knows it. He has robbed the grave of the prophet. He intends to sit by the sea until the gin bottles are empty, then piss one final time into the wind and drown himself.

The train lets him off at a fishing village. He limps down to the beach, ignoring the astonished stares of the villagers, and sits down on the sand. A wind has begun to blow, but no matter. First he takes off the black bowler hat he has worn for nearly thirty years, ever since that morning he picked it up in a deserted warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai and went away to hide and eat horseradish, the first of many times he would eat horseradish to try to quell the stink of his own soul, a stench that had first overpowered him that morning when he went to the warehouse to help his sister, to help the man who had been a boyhood friend, and discovered he was too late.

Too late. The night before the circus his projector had broken down. Two frames had stuck together in the lens and hypnotized him, put him to sleep. And so the next day he began eating horseradish, he put the black bowler hat on his head and never took it off in order to remember always the hatred he felt for his own black soul.

Now he removes that black hat and in its place he ties a large one made of straw, so low it covers his face, a hat worn in the Orient only by men condemned to death and by mendicant monks, those two alone, for it is traditional wisdom in the Orient not to look upon the face of a man about to die or the face of a man who begs in the name of Buddha.

The straw hat is affixed, the greatcoat is wrapped around him. He takes the mantle of Elijah and opens the first bottle of gin, pours, fills the hypodermic, recaps it. As he has seen others do, he ties a cord around the upper part of his arm. He touches a bulging vein. He plunges the needle into the vein and pushes the gin into his bloodstream.

A scream. Is this the still, small voice Elijah heard in the desert?

The needle falls from his hand and he’s a long time in finding it. Slowly he cleans the needle on the red flannel wrapped around his neck, cumbersome work because he can’t see what he’s doing, because he’s already incapable of untying the string around the flannel and holding the flannel in front of him.

Finally the needle is free from sand or more or less free from sand. Once more he pours gin, fills the needle, stabs his vein.

Shoots gin.

Shooting up a valise of gin.

Night comes. He has finished one bottle and started on another. The wind lashes him, the waves whirl high in the air. By morning he has emptied all the bottles and the sea has carried them away, carried away the valise and the needle as well, for now the typhoon is blowing full force.

A man sits on the sand in the eye of chaos and he neither sees nor hears. His legs are crossed, his chin rests on his chest, he is oblivious to all that passes in the world. Even if the princes and despots of a thousand lawless regions were to attack him it would be useless. Nor could the entire assembly of man attract his attention with their pleas, their dreams, their follies. He is invulnerable to everyone and everything, beyond sensation, alone at the end of the earth, alone on the far side of the moon, the dark side, with only the void as companion and parent and child.

The typhoon blows three days and three nights. As it subsides our man awakes at the bottom of the sea, on the floor of the ocean, where the typhoon has draped him with seaweed. Seaweed hangs from his straw hat, encrusts his arms, embraces his shoulders and his belly. The entire lower half of his body is hidden beneath the slippery fingers of rich iodine matter.

His legs are numb and his bad shoulder aches. He is cold, wet, devastated, totally ravaged. His mind is dazed and his eyes are two slim, slanting pools of nothingness. It is as if he were thinking thoughts too profound to be uttered.

On the ocean floor our man sees in front of him a line of gnarled, sturdy ancients, village elders, men who have known a life at sea. Their faces are the bows of ships, their hands are fish hooks. It is a scarred and weathered delegation, an embassy from some distant land above the sea. He watches them fall to their knees and press their foreheads to the sand.

The sands around him are stained with excrement and vomit and urine. A smell of putrid flesh hangs in the air, a stink of decay given off by layers of rotting clothing soaked under seaweed. Yet this foreign embassy seems unaware of the foul odors rising from the foul sands. They are bewitched by the immense, immobile figure dressed in seaweed.

He sees them gaze in awe at his straw hat and he realizes they have mistaken it. To them it is not the sign of the condemned man, it is the mark of the monk who traces the merciful steps and begs in the name of Buddha. Yes, obviously they have mistaken it.

Or is it he who has mistaken it?

For it seems that during the last three days and nights much of the Japanese coast has been destroyed. Above and below the village fishing fleets are wrecked, houses washed away, friends and relatives drowned. This village alone among hundreds has been spared. And how can that be unless the stranger who arrived mysteriously at the onset of the storm and took up his place by the sea, remaining there for three days and nights oblivious to wind and rain and waves, unless the stranger is a reincarnation of Nichiren, that militant holy man of the thirteenth century?

The village elders press their heads to the sand. They offer prayers to their patron saint and beg him to have mercy on them always, to protect them and stay with them forever, to honor them by living on the food they will provide in the temple they will provide.

Our man shakes loose the seaweed that encumbers him and rises to the surface of the water. He looks at the sun. He looks at the house in the pine grove on the cliff above the sea. He removes the straw hat that covers his face and recalls the words learned long ago in a No play, the words taught to him by a thin erect No actor of incomparable skill and subtlety, magnificat anima mea Dominum, my soul doth magnify the Lord.

Thus he bows and accepts the vocation that has come to him at last. Gravely he raises his head and greets the embassy of that small empire you see across the bay.

It was dark on the terrace. Geraty lit a candle and placed it between them in a glass chimney. His massive, solemn face hung over the railing searching for something below, a seagull or a rock or a wave.

The candle flickered. Briefly Geraty raised his hand to preach to the invisible seagulls, the invisible rocks, the invisible waves.

When do you leave?

Tomorrow. My ship sails from Yokohama.

Quite so.

Do you ever think of any of them anymore? Of America?

No. Never. There is no America here inside me, no Tokyo and no Shanghai either.

Geraty loomed up in front of Quin. His presence swelled until he filled the shadows of the terrace, his breathing noisier than the waves on the sides of the cliff. He was frowning. His white hair swirled over his face.

It may be, nephew, that you don’t quite understand it yet. It’s true that a monk ruled in the thirteenth century, a monk and not the Emperor or the great General or even the reckless circus master with his desperate, clever acts. Of course I’m not sure who you are, we can never be sure with another, but that doesn’t matter. The fishermen of this village believe I have the powers of Nichiren. They might even believe I’m a reincarnation of his strange spirit. But how could that be? Is that really the way it is?

Geraty stared hard at Quin. Far back in those huge eyes Quin saw a smile begin, and precisely at that moment the candle flame came to rest. The light was somber, still. The wind had stopped.

Not enough, whispered Geraty. Not just his powers and his will. What they perhaps don’t know is what you perhaps don’t know. It’s the final truth of the final scene, and it may be that no one knows it except me. Yet it’s simple enough, simpler than anyone would suspect.

I am Nichiren.

Geraty exploded in laughter. His hand struck his belly, and as it did a wind came. The dancing flame of the candle leapt and went out. The pine trees shivered, the seagulls shrieked, the sea surged above the rocks. In the darkness of a minute or an hour or all the years of his life Quin listened to the echoes of Geraty’s booming laughter.

He found the crevice under the pine trees and crept along the cliff to where the path became less steep. The wind was cold and he walked with his collar up, his back hunched. Halfway to the village he stopped and looked back.

The house was hidden. Did the Buddha sit with a candle? Did he peer through the blackness at the seagulls, the rocks, the waves?

Quin trudged along with his caravan, the lean Emperor and the small General marching to a silent stony drum, the animals in their cages, the jugglers wafting painted flutes and mingling torches in the air. Lotmann played his music, Adzhar spoke in a still, small voice, Lamereaux stroked the moss in his monastery, and Mama prayed on the lotus of her ivory elephant. The aerialist turned a somersault, the Siberian tiger pawed the ground. A brother solemnly changed his necktie, another sang across the sand.

It was a long parade and Quin walked ahead of it wearing the frock coat, carrying the megaphone, no announcement too extreme between the rice paddies and the beach, no costume too bizarre, no act of memory too daring.

He left the waterfront and climbed up the narrow street to the square beside the station. There an itinerant storyteller was setting up his stage. Children clustered in front of the empty frame.

The storyteller was so old his head shook. His tiny stage stood on three poles. He fitted a cardboard painting into the open frame, then assumed the voices of those who were shown.

First came a boy and his parents. The boy wandered along the beach and met a dragon who carried him to the emerald kingdom beneath the sea. A Princess spoke of the enchanted life that would be his if he remained there, but the boy elected to return to his home. He waved to the Princess and rose above the waves again, waved to the dragon and walked along the beach to find the trees moved, the houses gone, the familiar paths now leading elsewhere.

The boy sat down beside the road and cried.

An old man appeared who looked very much like the storyteller. He leaned on his cane in the middle of the road listening to the boy’s account of his wondrous journey. Then he explained the sad truth. One day in the emerald kingdom was the same as one hundred years on earth.

But I didn’t know, cried the boy.

No, said the old man. No, you didn’t.

The children in the square huddled beneath the stage. The tale seemed over. Now the boy stopped crying, the storyteller removed the last cardboard picture and stepped in front of the empty stage, into the frame of stars and darkness.

He was smiling. Leaning on his cane.

A true tale, he whispered. I know because once I was that boy and now I am that old man.

He nodded, the children smiled. They laughed. They shouted. They pushed back and forth and chased each other around the square as Quin walked into the station and left behind the old man with his extravagant cardboard pictures, his empty stage that had framed a shadowy figure in Mukden and Shanghai and Tokyo, in the Bronx, a clown once called Geraty.