Free Quin?s Shanghai Circus by Edward Whittemore

corrupt children ended as a stiff parade of derelicts with nothing to show the audience or each other but collapsed veins and ulcerous sores.
    Geraty himself found it increasingly impossible to break out of his alcoholic stupors. There were evenings when his exhibition of the history of Oriental lust consisted entirely of him taking off his clothes. He would stand in the spotlight mumbling the line he always repeated when naked, magnificat anima mea Dominum, at the same time as he fought off swarms of imaginary falcons and shouted orders at hordes of invisible children. After a time the whirlpool closed around him and he sank to the floor, collapsed on the immense black barge that was carrying Kyoto and all its ancient monasteries down through the night to the sea, there to begin for the ten thousandth time his incomprehensible recitation of dates and addresses, the journey across Asia that Quin remembered from the bar in the Bronx.
    So ended Geraty’s first decade after the war. Business dropped off, tourists avoided him. He was thrown out of hotel bars and told not to return. Whenever he got any money he spent it on a drinking bout that lasted until the money was gone. More often he could be seen behind a noodle stand in one of the slums of the city, washing a few dishes in exchange for a pinch of horseradish.
    Quin asked about the rare Buddhist manuscripts owned by Geraty, the extensive collection of pornography he had supposedly annotated.
    He found that not only had no one ever heard of the collection, no one believed such manuscripts could really exist. And in any case, it was inconceivable that they had been translated by the old giant with the horseradish habit.
    A scholarly exercise so vast it would take a convoy of trucks to transport it?
    They shook their heads in the bar and laughed. Obviously Quin had his man confused with someone else.
    When Quin returned from his wanderings in Tokyo, when he came back to the apartment where Big Gobi was waiting patiently for him, watching television, he always put his arms around Big Gobi and hugged him. That was the way they greeted each other. Quin smiling, Big Gobi grinning with tears in his eyes because he was so happy.
    Well, Gobes, I hope I wasn’t gone too long.
    It was nothing, Quin, nothing at all. You know you never have to worry about leaving me alone. I always know you’re coming back.
    They hugged again, Big Gobi laughed. Ever since he was a child he had always wanted to touch people and have them touch him. It was the only way he could be sure they were real. But at the orphanage they had never understood that. When he put his huge hands on the other boys they had always backed away from him.
    Stop pawing everyone, said the fathers.
    Run away when he does that, they told the other boys.
    From the beginning Big Gobi’s hands had disturbed him, even frightened him. He was never sure what they might do. For that reason he stopped touching the other boys, so they wouldn’t dislike him, and instead watched them carefully so he could understand how they acted, what they did and how they did it, so that he could do it the same way. He listened to them and said the same things. He watched their mouths and laughed the same way. He imitated everything about them and made the same silly faces.
    But for some reason the faces weren’t silly on Big Gobi. And when he laughed it didn’t seem funny.
    On Sunday nights they had oyster stew at the orphanage. While still young, Big Gobi discovered he loved oysters. He loved the smell of the sea that came from the pale jelly. He loved them because they were shapeless, because they had no hands.
    When he was old enough he asked for the job of opening the oysters on Sunday afternoons. They showed him how to do it, and it was his happiest hour of the week. Alone behind the kitchen facing the sky and the fields, the receding ridges of the Berkshires, he slit the cartilage of the shells and peeked into the juicy