The Circus of Dr Lao and Other Improbable Stories Read online

  “Most immaculate of all was his conception among the humble weeds and grasses. All things trample them, devour them, plow them under and destroy them. But they endure and are beautiful and retain their gentleness and harbor no rancor. Yet once a great passion came to them, a pure passion not ever to be clearly understood; revolt was in it, and other things foreign to grasses; and out of that strange passion of the plants the hound of the hedges was conceived and born.

  “And I wondered, too, for it had always been my belief that beauty was a modification of sex. Life sings a song of sex. Sex is the scream of life. Rutting and spawning the dance of life. Breed, breed, breed. Fill and refill the wombs of the world. Tumescence and ejaculation. Flinging out spore and seed and egg and bud. Quickening and birth. Sterility and death. That was life, I thought, and that was life’s means to the end that finally, after almost infinite centuries of trial and error, there might be produced the perfect living thing.

  “But here was this hound, product of no trial and error process, lacking lust, unhampered by ancestral fears and instincts. And I wondered if in this hound of the hedges were not to be found the apogee of all that life could ever promise. For here were beauty and gentleness and grace; only ferocity and sex and guile were lacking.

  “And I wondered: Is this a hint of the goal of life?’ “

  Doctor Lao reached in the cage and patted the hound’s head. The beast soughed like the murmur of wind in sycamore leaves.

  “What the hell is the Chink talking about?” asked Quarantine Inspector Number One.

  “I’ll be damned if I know,” said Quarantine Inspector Number Two. “Let’s go see the mermaid. That goddam dog looks like a fake to me, somehow.”

  She lolled in her tank of salt water, her winnowing fishtail stirring salty bubbles that frothed and foamed about her slight breasts, and little bits of waterfoam clung to her fair wild hair. Her sea-green, sleekscaled fishtail arched in the water, and the fanlike fin on the end showed pink as a trout’s. She sang a little lilting song of the far waves from which they had taken her, and the goldfish that swam with her in the tank poised on their nervous fins to listen. She laughed at the little red fishes, stirring them with her slender hands. They came to her and nibbled about her shoulders and swam in and out among the tresses of her water-lifted hair. Graceful as a fish she was and beautiful as a girl, and stranger than either; and the two quarantine inspectors were shocked because she wore no bathing suit.

  “We found her in the Gulf of Pei-Chihli,” said Doctor Lao. “We found her there on the brown, muddy waves. They were brown and muddy because inland it had rained and the little rivers had carried the silt out into the sea. And after finding her we came upon the sea serpent, and we captured him, too. It was a most fortunate day. But she pines sometimes, I think, for her great grey ocean. I hate to keep her penned up in this tank, but I know of nowhere else to put her. I think I shall turn her loose some day when we are showing along the sea-coast. Yes, I shall take her out in the dawn when no one else is about and carry her down to the sea. Waist-deep in the water I’ll go with her in my arms, and I’ll put her down gently and let her swim away. And I shall stand there, an odd, foolish-looking old man, waist-deep in the water, mourning over the beauty I have just let slip away from me, mourning over the beauty I could touch and see but never completely comprehend; and, if anyone sees me there, waist-deep at dawn in the water, surely they will think me mad. But do you suppose that after she swims out a little ways she will turn and wave at me? Do you suppose she will blow a little kiss to me? Oh, God, if I could only have seen her when I was a young man! The contemplation of her beauty might have changed my whole life. Beauty can do that, can’t it?

  “Yes, I think I will take her down to the sea and free her. And I will stand there and watch her swim out into the tide. But I wonder if she will turn and wave at me. Do you think she will, sir?”

  “Uh, I couldn’t say,” said Quarantine Inspector Number Two.

  “What do you feed her, doc?” asked Inspector Number One.

  “Seafoods,” said the doctor. “Let’s go look at the sphinx.”

  The blunt-nosed woman-face of the thing stared at the two inspectors as they followed the Chinaman into the tent. The leonine tail switched softly at flies. “You bring the queerest people in here, Doctor Lao,” said the sphinx reproachfully.

  “It’s all in the interest of the trade,” said the doctor.

  “Good Lord! Can it talk?” asked an inspector.

  “Of course,” said the doctor, while the sphinx looked bored.

  “What is it, a he-sphinx or a she-sphinx?” asked the other inspector.

  Doctor Lao was embarrassed. “Come outside and I’ll tell you,” he muttered.

  Out of the tent he said to them secretively: “I wish you hadn’t asked that in front of the sphinx. You see, it’s neither man nor woman; it’s both.”

  “Aw, how can it be?” asked the first inspector.

  “Haven’t you gentlemen ever heard of such a thing? Really, I’m amazed. A long time ago a man named Winkelmann found it out by looking closely at little African sphinxes. They are actually both male and female at the same time. The state of being bisexual, it is called.”

  “Well, I’ll be durned,” said Inspector Number Two. “Let’s go back and look at that critter again, Al.”

  Frank Tull, the lawyer, telephoned his wife a little after two from his office and asked her if she wanted to go to the circus.

  “No,” she said, “but I advise you to go and take another good long look at that man you thought was a bear. Then maybe you’ll realize how easy it is for people to see one thing and swear they saw something totally different when they get on the witness stand.”

  “Aw, honey,” said Frank, “what the hell do you want to be nasty for? I thought you had forgotten all about that by this time. I said it was a man, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, but you said it just to humor me. And if there’s anything I hate, it’s being humored, especially when I know I’m right.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what, dear: you come and go with me, and we’ll both look at that thing again, and whichever of us was wrong will apologize to the other. How’s that?”

  “My God, Frank, I know perfectly well it was a man! I see no necessity for going out to that hot circus just to convince myself all over again. But you go, and I will be very gracious about it when you come home and apologize to me for sneering at me the way you did this morning.”

  “You are being very unreasonable, darling.”

  “On the contrary, I conceive myself as being the acme of reasonableness, considering the way you cackled at me, and all those honied things you said about my needing glasses. If I had acted according to the promptings of my indignation I would have caused a scene that might have ended only in the divorce courts.”

  “Listen, honey, are you really still sore about that parade, or are you just kidding me?”

  “No, I’m not sore, Frank. But neither am I kidding.”

  ‘Well, I wish you’d change your mind and go.”

  “No, Frank, really I don’t care about seeing it. You go on by yourself and have a good time, dear,”

  “Well . . . good-by.”

  “Good-by.”

  So Frank told his stenographer to tell any of his clients who might call on him that he would be back in half an hour, and he went out and got in his sedan and drove down Main Street to the circus grounds.

  A man of many artificial parts was Lawyer Frank Tull. His teeth had been fashioned for him and fitted to his jaws by a doctor of dental surgery. His eyes, weak and wretched, saw the world through bifocal lenses, so distorted that only through them could the distortion of Frank’s own eyes perceive things aright. He had a silver plate in his skull to guard a hole from which a brain tumor had been removed. One of his legs was made of metal and fiber; it took the place of the flesh-and-blood leg his mother had given him in her womb. Around his belly was an apparatus that fitted mouth-like ov
er his double hernia and prevented his guts from falling out. A suspensory kept his scrotum from dangling unduly. In his left arm a platinum wire took the place of the humerus. Once every alternating week he went to the clinic and was injected either with salvarsan or mercury according to the antepenultimate week’s dose to prevent the Spirochaeta pallida from holding too much power over his soul. Odd times he suffered prostate massages and subjected himself to deep irrigations to rectify another chronic fault in his machinery. Now and then, to keep his good one going, they flattened his rotten lung with gas. On one ear was strapped an arrangement designed to make ordinary sounds more audible. In the shoe of his good foot an arch supporter kept that foot from splaying out. A wig covered the silver plate in his skull. His tonsils had been taken from him, and so had his appendix and his adenoids. Stones had been carved from his gall, and a cancer burnt from his nose. His piles had been removed, and water had been drained from his knee. Sometimes they fed him with enemas; and they punched a hole in his throat so that he could breathe when his noseholes clogged. He carried his head in a steel brace, for his neck was broken; currently also his toenails ingrew. As a member of the finest species life had yet produced he could not wrest a living from the plants of the field, nor could he compete with the beasts thereof. As a member of the society into which he had been born he was respected and taken care of and lived on, surviving, no doubt, because he was fit. He was a husband but not a father, a married man but not a lover. One hundred years after he died they opened up his coffin. All they found were strings and wires.

  He parked his car, got out of it, and walked across the street to the circus to look at its freaks.

  The chimera lay sleeping on a pile of freshly turned clay, and it coughed in its sleep; and the fetor of its belching, wafting upwards, asphyxiated the gnats that swarmed about its head. Little dead denizens of the lower air strata, they fell like floating flakes of powder, and no requiem accompanied their falling. The sleeping chimera kicked in his sleep, following the dictates of some action-filled dream; and the great claws of his paws lacerated the clay upon which he slept. His eagle wings half spread, their pinions expanding fanwise, and, all rumpled, they drew together again, the feathers tangled and fluffy. His dragon tail stirred snakelike, and the metal barb of its tip plowed up little furrows in the clay. His whiskers were singed where his fire-breath had scorched them. Some of the scales on his tail were gangrened and sloughing off where a colony of parasites bred and pullulated. He was shedding; great loose patches of fur, like hunks of felt, hung from his hide. Ticks crawled about in and over those patches. He had a nasty minkish smell, keenly sweetish, fattily pukish, vile and penetrating.

  Frank Tull, the lawyer, stood there and stared at the chimera and was horrified to perceive that it was not a fake after all.

  “By Gawd!” said one of the quarantine inspectors, “I never thought there was no sech animal.”

  The sleeping chimera gave a great snort; sparks, soot, smoke, and flame frothed out of his nostrils.

  “That’s why we have to bed him down on clay,” said Doctor Lao. “If we let him sleep on hay, he’d burn it all up. Do you know how he manages that fire-breathing trick? Well, sir, it’s simple when you understand his metabolism. You see, the chimera, like Arizona’s outstanding citizen, the Gila monster, has no elimination system in the sense that ordinary animals have. Instead of expelling waste matter through the bowels, he burns it up within him, and he snorts out the smoke and ashes. Yes, a chimera is its own incinerator plant. Very unusual beast.”

  “What makes you think Gila monsters have no elimination system?” asked Mr. Etaoin.

  “Well, that’s what everybody around here claims,” said the doctor. “A hell of a lot of people have told me that. Seems that’s how the Gila monsters get their poison: the waste matter in them having no outlet, it concentrates and intensifies and putrefies and works into their saliva so that when one of the big lizards bites anyone he thereby poisons him. Quite an interesting theory, I think. I much prefer its piquancy to a more rational explanation of Heloderma’s venomous attributes.”

  “Well, however did you ketch this here shimmerra, doctor?” a country lass wanted to know.

  “Oh, we got him years ago in Asia Minor. Chimeras have one frailty: they are enamored of the moon. So we took a mirror, placed it on a mountain top where it reflected the midnight moonlight, and the lunar-loving monster thought his bright silver ball was in reach at last. Well, sir, he came soaring and screaming down out of the heavens, crashed into the mirror, and us boys we jumps out, and over his shoulders we flings a golden chain. We had him!”

  “Oh, Doctor Lao!” said a woman reporter from the Abalone Tribune, “I do so hope you will give me an interview sometime and tell me all about your wonderful adventures!”

  “They’d make front-page news all right in a hick town like this,” affirmed Doctor Lao.

  An old-like, wealthy-looking party in golf pants and sport shirt and plaid socks probed at the chimera with his walking cane. The monster peevishly switched his tail like a horse switching at flies, raking the cane out of the old-like party’s hand and sloughing him across the shins with the metal-barbed tip.

  “Don’t be foolin’ with that animal, mister,” warned Doctor Lao.

  “What do you feed him?” somebody asked.

  “Rattlesnakes,” said the doctor.

  “Lots of rattlers around Abalone here,” said one of the quarantine inspectors. “I killed a hellbellin’ big sidewinder down towards Beeswax last spring.”

  “You must be mistaken, friend,” said Doctor Lao. “Sidewinders do not attain to any great size. In fact, they are among the smallest of the crotaline snakes.”

  “Well, this one was bigger than hell, by God,” asserted the quarantine inspector.

  “What I can’t understand,” said the old-like party in the golf pants, “is how in the world one animal can combine in itself the attributes of a lizard, an eagle, and a lion, as does this chimera, and have them all so perfectly blended together. Now, I cannot tell where the lion leaves off in this beast and where the lizard begins, nor where the eagle starts in; yet there they all three are in a balanced combination. What sort of lizard would you say is incorporated in the monster’s make-up, Doctor Lao? Could it be one of those Central American monitors, or iguanas as they are called?”

  “Me no sawee lizard talk,” said the old Chinaman.

  “Maybe it’s the beast of the Apocalypse,” remarked Lawyer Frank Tull, who felt that he should remark something and not stand there forever silent like an idiot or a damn fool.

  “Nothing of the sort,” replied the old-like party in the golf pants. “We all know there never was such a thing. Biblical baloney, if you will permit me to say so, my dear sir. Biblical baloney. Sheer and unadulterated biblical baloney. Yes, sir, biblical baloney. You’ll find lots of it in the old book.”

  “Well, my daddy claims the Bible’s a mighty fine book,” said the country lass.

  ‘The chimera,” said Doctor Lao, “flies high on tireless pinions; so high, indeed, that mortal man is rarely vouchsafed a glimpse of him. Years ago, in the Asia Minor campaigns of the great Iskander, one of the Macedonian captains killed a chimera with his longbow. He took it back with him to the museum at Alexandria, and there, to preserve it for posterity, it was mounted by some forgotten Egyptian taxidermist. Years later, a monk from Tibet saw it in the museum and, on returning to his lamasery, made a statue of it in porcelain and set it out to decorate the yard. Still later, a Chinese, coming to that part of the country from the Northern Capital, saw the strange figure and took measurements of its proportions. Returning to his home, he fashioned another statue in bronze and presented it to Kublai, then great khan of all the Mongols. Then, when Kublai had the Tatar wall constructed in a square about the Northern Capital, he also ordered an astronomical tower built upon its eminence. In the tower were placed various instruments, yardstick arrangements for measuring the stars. And for the decorative motif
to be worked into the design of these instruments, Kublai ordained that the figure of the chimera be used. This was done. Nowadays, one may still see chimeras in bronze writhing around celestial globes and holding in their claws celestial computing rods.

  “Other Chinese kings, coming there from time to time, saw these chimeras, wondered at them, understood their significance not, and went away thinking that somehow the beasts symbolized the power of the great khan. Then the petty Chinese princes commenced using the chimera motif themselves and had it worked into the designs of their own royal decorations. About that time the misleading name of dragon was coined to designate this royal emblem, and wrongly, of course, the dragon was taken to mean ferocity. But the chimera of Kublai was a benevolent beast, a patron of the arts of contemplation and study; and it must have been surprised when later it found itself spraddled on a banner, going to war.

  “Afterwards, when other lesser kings supplanted Kublai, one of them decided that his particular dragon should have five toes and that the dragons of other kings might have three toes, four toes, or even six or seven toes, but not five. A rival king disobeyed this edict, and war ensued. I forget how the war came out. You will notice that this chimera of mine, however, has four toes on his front feet and three on his rear, so the dogmatic king, if he supposed he had authenticity to back his claims, was very much mistaken. I never thought to count the toes on Kublai’s chimeras in Peking, so I can’t say whether the ancient sculptors were accurate.”