That night, after the corporal left, Mama sat up alone meditating. The next day was New Year’s, her birthday as it was the birthday for everyone of her race.
The cough struck her son a short time afterward, struck him quickly and violently as if the world could no longer tolerate the passage of time. Its course was brief, nothing could be done. She held him and watched his spirit go, one tiny sacrifice to an era where Nanking was but the first act of the far grander circus that was to follow.
She wanted to leave Tokyo and Japan as well. Only one enclave remained on the mainland where a Japanese could still mix with foreigners, Shanghai, an outlaw city where the chaos and despair might equal her own.
She found it all she had expected and more. Among the foreigners who were still there, who had nowhere to go, nothing was left untried. Mama began taking laudanum, the solution of opium in alcohol preferred by many because of its combination of effects.
She spent her time with a group of companions who met nightly to narcotize themselves, to take part in orgies or watch them. Like them she slept during the day and went out only at night. Her nameless companions disappeared regularly, victims of suicides or intrigues, to be replaced by other weary faces who would disappear in turn.
To ease their pain they gave up using each other, or having others used in front of them, and took to watching pornographic movies, a lifeless display of mutilations and fecal sandwiches and tubercular saliva so unreal they could bury themselves in the long nights and dream nothing around them existed.
Of all the people who passed through her life during that period of forgetfulness, only one remained in her memory, the projectionist who showed the movies.
He was a huge man, an American, a giant with a pockmarked face. His body was bloated and his eyes bulged from the quantities of alcohol he consumed. As soon as he arrived in the locked, shuttered room and set up his battered projector there was a sense of relief because the lights could be turned off. The projector whined, the reels rattled, the flickering images crept across the wall as Mama and the others sank into their couches.
The projectionist had a strange habit of taking off his clothes. Apparently this was because the machine he used was an old one that quickly overheated. Or so Mama assumed as she watched him fumbling with his garments during the course of the evening, pulling them off one by one until at midnight he was naked save for a towel over his loins.
Like others in the room, Mama often slipped over to the machine after midnight to whisper to the giant. When she did he listened to her impassively, not commenting, occasionally nodding his head. As the weeks went by Mama found herself telling him more and more about her life, eventually confessing everything.
It was a unique experience for her. At the time she couldn’t have said why he had this effect on her, why she felt the need to slip over to him and whisper in the darkness. Perhaps it was because he accepted everything she said, perhaps because the huge shadowy profile cast by the dim light of the projection lamp was totally anonymous.
Or perhaps simply because he was naked. An immobile naked giant who heard everything and saw everything, from whom there was nothing to fear.
Nor was the bloated American merely her confessor in that locked, shuttered room. He was also an impostor and a clown.
For a long time, it seemed to Mama, the images on the wall had been becoming dimmer. One night she asked the huge naked projectionist about this and he waved his arms extravagantly. He said that maybe he couldn’t get the proper bulbs. Or maybe the electrical system in the city was failing. Or maybe this and maybe that.
He kept on talking, muttering. He looked down on her with a smile, and all at once she knew the confessor was confessing, confiding some monstrous private joke to her about Shanghai. About the hopelessly despairing men and women who came to whisper to him in the shadows. About life.
She went back to her couch and watched the films more closely. She made a discovery.
There were great numbers of animals and humans in the films, but none of the scenes was remotely pornographic. She couldn’t be sure, the films were so scratched they were nearly invisible, but as best she could tell they were documentaries of some kind, crudely done documentaries that seemed to be explaining the basic techniques of animal husbandry. The animals were common barnyard varieties, underfed, the men and women looked like Russian peasants.
Primitive instructive movies from the early days of the Russian Revolution. Where had he found them and why? How was he able to show them and make the depraved people in that room think they were watching a dazzling tableau of debauchery?
A kind and lonely man. As kind and lonely as a clown.
A rumor passed among the companions that one night soon there would be a special circus, an entertainment such as no one had ever seen, a performance that in some unknown way would bring ultimate satisfaction to all those who witnessed it. The companions were excited. They could not disguise their longing for the mysterious spectacle.
Only Mama was unsure. The clown’s trick had made her think of oysters.
To her the oyster had always been a theological symbol because it was encapsuled and complete, because it resembled the gray jelly of the brain, because Lao-tzu had once spoken of a substanceless image existing before the Yellow Ancestor. To Mama it seemed likely the oyster might be that image. More than once in her despair she had dreamed of becoming an oyster.
But that was before the clown had smiled at her. There was magic in the illusions he worked with his films, a magic so simple it had made her smile for the first time since the death of the General, made her smile and realize she was not yet ready to join these other voyeurs in a circus of death. Instead she decided to visit the circus master alone, before he gave his performance.
She stopped taking laudanum to clear her mind. She meditated, something she hadn’t done in a year. The night before the circus she came to the filming room as usual.
The couches were arranged in rows, the windows shuttered, the door bolted. She waited until after midnight before she sneaked out of the room. By then the companions were dazed with opium smoke and the clown was snoring fitfully, his bulk spread over three or four large chairs beside the stalled projector. After years of use the ancient documentary had finally snapped. The machine still purred, a reel flapped around and around, but the frame on the wall remained the same, a peasant hovel with a large indistinct animal pressing at the door. Perhaps two frames had been trapped in the lens when the machine stalled.
No one saw her leave. She slipped into a rickshaw, closed the curtains around her, and began the long ride down Bubbling Well Road.
Her destination was an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city. The building was square, window-less, with tall skylights. A muffled shriek, a squeal drifted to her on the wind.
She passed down a canvas corridor, the draped cages of the sleeping animals. Strange costumes, spangled and hairy, hung from the packing boxes. The warehouse itself turned out to be a vast open space lit by moonlight. The ceiling vaulted toward the sky, the corners were left in darkness. Here echoes could have no end, for the great empty area was no less than a cavern of the mind.
He was standing in the sawdust ring. He wore a black bowler hat, a lavender frock coat. In one hand he held a megaphone, in the other a whip. He was standing with his head back and his arms spread, staring at the sky.
She went up to him and bowed. She told him who she was and why she had come. She said that she was one of the group that had commissioned the circus but that she had decided not to come, despite her misery. So she was here alone to learn from the master the meaning of his final performance.