Quin?s Shanghai Circus by Edward Whittemore

Author:Edward Whittemore [Whittemore, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781480433885
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

KIKUCHI-LOTMANN

5

Now we see him stepping into the ring, the master of ceremonies dressed in boots and frock coat, carrying whip and megaphone, a shaman and arbiter of marvels.

QUIN CAME AND WENT. Big Gobi left the apartment with him once, for the first visit to Father Lamereaux, but he was so confused by the meeting Quin left him behind after that. Quin said something about the names Father Lamereaux had given him. Big Gobi nodded and kept his eyes on the television screen.

Names are fine, he muttered as Quin closed the door.

The Living Room was an underground bar many levels below the street. Quin knew the Japanese custom of referring to all female proprietors of bars as Mama-san, so as soon as he came upon a waiter, after having walked down several hundred steps, he asked for Mama-san saying they had a mutual friend, Father Lamereaux.

The suspicious waiter directed him to a corner where there stood a man of some four hundred pounds, a former sumo wrestler with a huge mallet resting on his shoulder. The former sumo wrestler held the mallet over Quin’s head until the waiter returned.

The waiter bowed. He apologized for his family and education, his meanness of spirit, his boorish and crass behavior, his whining voice, his unsavory appearance and total incompetence. Mama would see him presently.

In the meantime Quin was invited to be her guest in the Round Room, reserved for the most honored guests. They left the wrestler in the shadows and started down an interminable spiral staircase. Occasionally the waiter stopped to ask Quin if he liked Japan, and when Quin reassured him that he did the man sucked air noisily through his teeth out of wonder or gratitude, or simply because nothing else seemed appropriate.

After descending another three or four hundred feet they entered a circular room where a dozen men or more sat at a counter facing the wall, or rather small windows recessed in the wall. Their backs were to him and no one turned when he came in. The waiter directed him to an empty stool, sucked air, and disappeared.

A face peered up at him from the bartenders’ runway, which was sunken so the heads of the bartenders would not protrude above the counter. Quin ordered a drink and saw a hand come up over the edge with a glass.

On the counter in front of him there was a console of buttons. Family portrait, said one. Small projection lamp, said another. Tattoos. Kobe cameras. Quin arbitrarily pressed the button for Nose.

The screen that Quin had mistaken for a mirror flickered. The screens were built in such a way that only the man directly in front of one could see which private movie he had selected. To everyone else the screens remained mirrors reflecting a distorted view of the small round room.

The first nose was flat and spreading. It grew in size until the screen could no longer contain it. The pores, rich dark holes, were soon big enough to put a fist in, as big as craters in a desert.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.