The Circus of Dr Lao and Other Improbable Stories Read online

  “Will chimeras breed in captivity?” asked the lawyer.

  “Oh, certainly,” said the doctor. “They’ll breed any time. This fellow here is always trying to get at the sphinx.”

  “Well, that isn’t exactly what I mean, though, of course, it’s interesting to know, I meant will they reproduce?”

  “How can they, when they all are males?”

  “What? Are there no female chimeras?”

  “Not a single one, and very few males either, for that matter. You are looking at a rare animal, mister.”

  “Well, if there are no females, then where do they come from?”

  ‘This one came from Asia Minor, as I already said a moment ago.”

  “Oh, hell! I mean how are they born?”

  “Your question is unanswerable. No one knows the least detail of the life cycle of the chimera.”

  “Could it not be that the female chimera, like the females of several insect species, is of an entirely different bodily make-up from the male and, so far, has not been identified as such by science?” asked the old-like party in the golf pants.

  “Science does not even recognize the existence of the male chimera, let alone search for its mate,” said Doctor Lao.

  “What is science, anyway?” asked the country lass.

  “Science?” said the doctor. “Why, science is nothing but classification. Science is just tagging a name to everything.”

  The chimera awoke. The mists of sleep glazed his green eyes, and reflections of strange dreams swam and receded in his brain. Raising a hind foot he scratched at his tick-crawling hide and, done with the scratching, sniffed at the claw that had scourged the ticks. Doctor Lao took a rattlesnake from a large canister and tossed it to the chimera. The rattler fell in a heap, arched its head, whirred and buzzed and shifted its coils and defied the monster.

  The chimera regarded the rattler as intently as a scullion maid regards a cockroach she is about to step on. Then he flung his tail high up over his back, as does a scorpion, and leaning forward, still as does a scorpion, struck the viper a smart blow on its head with the metal tip of his tail, also as would a scorpion. The rattler died. The chimera picked it up in his forepaws and, sitting kangaroo-like on his haunches, devoured the snake, nipping off the rattles with his front teeth and nicely spitting them aside. He ate the rattler a bite at a time as a child eats a banana and with every whit as much satisfaction. Done with the meal, the monster groveled before Doctor Lao, snorting smoke rings and begging for more food.

  “No, my pretty thing; one snake a day is all you get in this hot weather,” said the aged Chinese.

  “You know,” he continued to his audience, “it is very necessary to watch our animals’ diet down here in Arizona. I think it is because of the lack of humidity or something. Although it may very well be nothing but the dust. Anyhow, if we overfeed them, they invariably have colic or, what is worse, worms. This chimera, of course, with his peculiar interior incinerating system burns the worms up as fast as they attack him. But take our sphinx, for instance. It is a homeric task to worm a sphinx. Ordinary vermifuges won’t do at all. It takes a profoundly powerful purgative in large, incessant doses. The last time I wormed the sphinx it voided some of the strangest-looking worms I ever saw in my life. Just like enormous noodles they were. And now every time I look at noodles I think of those wretched tapeworms, and every time I look at tapeworms I think of noodles. It’s very distressing.”

  ‘The noodle is a favorite Chinese dish, too, is it not?” asked the old-like party in the golf pants.

  “I prefer shark fins,” said Doctor Lao.

  The widow Mrs. Howard T. Cassan came to the circus in her flimsy brown dress and her low shoes and went direct to the fortuneteller’s tent. She paid her mite and sat down to hear of her future. Apollonius warned her she was going to be disappointed.

  “Not if you tell me the truth,” said Mrs. Cassan. “I particularly want to know how soon oil is going to be found on that twenty acres of mine in New Mexico.”

  “Never,” said the seer.

  “Well, then, when shall I be married again?”

  “Never,” said the seer.

  “Very well. What sort of man will next come into my life?”

  “There will be no more men in your life,” said the seer.

  “Well, what in the world is the use of my living then, if I’m not going to be rich, not going to be married again, not going to know any more men?”

  “I don’t know,” confessed the prophet. “I only read futures. I don’t evaluate them.”

  “Well, I paid you. Read my future.”

  ‘Tomorrow will be like today, and day after tomorrow will be like the day before yesterday,” said Apollonius. “I see your remaining days each as quiet, tedious collections of hours. You will not travel anywhere. You will think no new thoughts. You will experience no new passions. Older you will become but not wiser. Stiffer but not more dignified. Childless you are, and childless you shall remain. Of that suppleness you once commanded in your youth, of that strange simplicity which once attracted a few men to you, neither endures, nor shall you recapture any of them any more. People will talk to you and visit with you out of sentiment or pity, not because you have anything to offer them. Have you ever seen an old cornstalk turning brown, dying, but refusing to fall over, upon which stray birds alight now and then, hardly remarking what it is they perch on? That is you. I cannot fathom your place in life’s economy. A living thing should either create or destroy according to its capacity and caprice, but you, you do neither. You only live on dreaming of the nice things you would like to have happen to you but which never happen; and you wonder vaguely why the young lives about you which you occasionally chide for a fancied impropriety never listen to you and seem to flee at your approach. When you die you will be buried and forgotten, and that is all. The morticians will enclose you in a worm-proof casket, thus sealing even unto eternity the clay of your uselessness. And for all the good or evil, creation or destruction, that your living might have accomplished, you might just as well never have lived at all. I cannot see the purpose in such a life. I can see in it only vulgar, shocking waste.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t evaluate lives,” snapped Mrs, Cassan.

  “I’m not evaluating; I’m only wondering. Now you dream of an oil well to be found on twenty acres of land you own in New Mexico. There is no oil there. You dream of some tall, dark, handsome man to come wooing you. There is no man coming, dark, tall, or otherwise. And yet you will dream on in spite of all I tell you; dream on through your little round of hours, sewing and rocking and gossiping and dreaming; and the world spins and spins and spins. Children are born, grow up, accomplish, sicken, and die; you sit and rock and sew and gossip and live on. And you have a voice in the government, and enough people voting the same way you vote could change the face of the world. There is something terrible in that thought. But your individual opinion on any subject in the world is absolutely worthless. No, I cannot fathom the reason for your existence.”

  “I didn’t pay you to fathom me. Just tell me my future and let it go at that.”

  “I have been telling you your future! Why don’t you listen? Do you want to know how many more times you will eat lettuce or boiled eggs? Shall I enumerate the instances you will yell good-morning to your neighbor across the fence? Must I tell you how many more times you will buy stockings, attend church, go to moving picture shows? Shall I make a list showing how many more gallons of water in the future you will boil making tea, how many more combinations of cards will fall to you at auction bridge, how often the telephone will ring in your remaining years? Do you want to know how many more times you will scold the paper-carrier for not leaving your copy in the spot that irks you least? Must I tell you how many more times you will become annoyed at the weather because it rains or fails to rain according to your wishes? Shall I compute the pounds of pennies you will save shopping at bargain centers? Do you want to know all that? For
that is your future, doing the same small futile things you have done for the last fifty-eight years. You face a repetition of your past, a recapitulation of the digits in the adding machine of your days. Save only one bright numeral, perhaps: there was love of a sort in your past; there is none in your future.”

  “Well, I must say, you are the strangest fortuneteller I ever visited.”

  “It is my misfortune only to be able to tell the truth.”

  “Were you ever in love?”

  “Of course. But why do you ask?”

  “There is a strange fascination about your brutal frankness. I could imagine a girl, or an experienced woman, rather, throwing herself at your feet.”

  “There was a girl, but she never threw herself at my feet. I threw myself at hers.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She laughed.”

  “Did she hurt you?”

  “Yes. But nothing has hurt me very much since.”

  “I knew it! I knew a man of your terrible intenseness had been hurt by some woman sometime. Women can do that to a man, can’t they?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You poor, poor man! You are not so very much older than I am, are you? I, too, have been hurt. Why couldn’t we be friends, or more than friends, perhaps, and together patch up the torn shreds of our lives? I think I could understand you and comfort you and care for you.”

  “Madam, I am nearly two thousand years old, and all that time I have been a bachelor. It is too late to start over again.”

  “Oh, you are being so delightfully foolish! I love whimsical talk! We would get on splendidly, you and I; I am sure of it!”

  “I’m not. I told you there were no more men in your life. Don’t try to make me eat my own words, please. The consultation is ended. Good afternoon.”

  She started to say more, but there was no longer anyone to talk to. Apollonius had vanished with that suddenness commanded by only the most practiced magicians. Mrs. Cassan went out into the blaze of sunshine. There she encountered Luther and Kate. It was then precisely ten minutes before Kate’s petrification.

  “My dear,” said Mrs. Cassan to Kate, “that fortuneteller is the most magnetic man I ever met in my whole life. I am going to see him again this evening.”

  “What did he say about the oil?” asked Luther.

  “Oh, he was frightfully encouraging,” said Mrs. Cassan.

  Influenced by liquor as they had never been influenced by the Young Men’s Christian Association, the two college youths from back East, Slick Bromiezchski and Paul Conrad Gordon, came into the circus uttering wisecracks and having a hell of a good time generally.

  Doctor Lao saw them at long range and came dashing up. “Whatsah mattah Glod damn college punks come this place?” he demanded. “You no sawee nothing here. Glet to hell out! This my show, by Glod!”

  They laughed at the little old man’s frenzy, threatening to sic the Japs on him if he didn’t pipe down. They quoted laws they made up on the spot to show him he couldn’t prevent anyone who paid from looking at his circus. Advising him to give up trying to be a Barnum and to go back to washing the smells out of shirt-tails, they wended their way to the peep-show and forgot him.

  The peepshow was within a small tent off by itself. A curtain in the tent had holes punched in it at various heights to accommodate the eyes of men of varying stature. Through one of the holes an old-like party in golf pants was staring; through another a quarantine inspector was trying to get his eyes focused; the remaining holes were vacant of peepers.

  The college youths each sleeted a hole that suited his ocular altitude, hunched over, and stared and stared.

  Around an old grass hut three Negro priests were dancing beneath a symbol of striking masculinity. It was a rain dance, and a drizzle accompanied their posturings. They threw off their grass skirts, dancing nude under the huge lingam, their black hides greasy with the rain.

  Out of the hut five maidens came, black maidens, lean and virginal and luscious. The priests pounced upon them and stripped them, and flung away dancing; the double thud of drums came mumbling through the rain. The black girls danced among the priests, stumbling and limping as the chaff and stubble on the ground bit into their feet. Black bodies bounded in the grey wetness.

  The double thud of drums drummed louder, and the priests danced more madly; but exceeding even their ardor, the wenches snatched long willow withes from trees and flailed the black priestly hides, the withes cutting pink stripes along the ordained backs and bellies; and the double thud of drums came roaring down through the pouring rain, and the black priests howled and postured from the hot, queer pain of the maidens’ lashings.

  The great lingam shook and trembled; the grey dust of the rain settled like ashes on the black skins; the wind laughed and screamed; the rain ceased; and out of the forest stalked Mumbo Jumbo thumping a tomtom.

  Under an amorphously soft glowing rainbow came Mumbo Jumbo; and the black Corybants kotowed and groveled and salaamed and genuflected and hunkered down and made obeisance. He spat on their godpraising shoulders.

  The wenches eyed him and wiggled at him, made coy signs to him and trembled lasciviously. Mumbo Jumbo examined them carefully, felt and prodded and punched and pinched them. And he squeezed and rubbed and tickled and bit them. And he kissed them and rubbed their noses and pulled their ears and tasted their tongues and smelled their breaths and fingered them; and the wenches endured it all and snuggled up to him and warmed against him. But they pleased him not. He took up a club and beat them down into the mud; and he jabbed and poked the priests to their feet, and into their cowed faces he yelled his disapproval.

  They huddled together and mumbled amongst themselves. One came cringing up to the god, making placating passes at him. Mumbo Jumbo struck him down beside the rejected virgins.

  Then the other priests slunk into the grass temple and emerged carrying a cross upon which was bound a fair-haired Nordic girl. They dropped her at the god’s feet and fled. Mumbo Jumbo looked down upon her and was pleased. He unloosed her from the cross, picked her up by the hair, and under the still amorphously soft glowing rainbow, disappeared into the forest.

  “Whoopee!” yelled Paul Conrad. “Boy, do I envy that big coon!”

  “Oh, shut up!” said the old-like party in the golf pants. “Can’t you damned punks look at anything without yelling your fool heads off? Where the hell do you think you are, anyway; back on the campus?”

  ‘Well, if you don’t like our style, grampaw, why, you know what you can do about it,” said Slick Bromiezchski.

  “For once you said something intelligent,” replied the oldlike party. “I’m going to complain to the management.” And he went barging out of the tent.

  “Imagine complaining to the management of this outfit,” chortled Paul.

  “Just imagine,” chortled Slick.

  Laughing tranquilly, the college men returned to their peepholes.

  Nymphs lay about on grey rocks, fat young nymphs with stomachs like washerwomen’s and hips like horses’. Out in the rushes by the sea’s edge the faun stood watching them.

  Pink and white and young, and shy with the innocence of youth was the faun, pretty as a little choirboy without his cassock and hymnal. He stood amid the green rushes and watched the fat, lewd girls, who knew he was watching them. And they laughed and flounced about and did obscene things to one another, and the little faun parted the green rushes the better to watch them.

  Two nymphs danced, the others laughing at them and urging them on; and all the nymphs watched the faun out of the corners of their eyes as he trembled among the rushes. But he only watched; he would approach no closer; and they called jeeringly to him and dared him to come play with them. But he shook his head, remaining where he was.

  The nymphs lolled about, pawing at each other; and each nymph hoped that the others would leave so that she alone might go down to the faun. Then he came out of the rushes and up on the sand a little way, and from behind a r
ock, ready to leap away, watched them. They pretended to disregard him, knotting flowers in their hair, tossing sand on one another’s shoulders, squatting about awkwardly and laughing shrilly. One threw a bee on her sister, and the bee stung, and the sister wept and then rose furiously to her feet; and the two nymphs fought as girls fight, weeping and scratching and biting and clawing. And the others threw sand at them and laughed and urged them on. And the little faun crept up a little closer.

  One of the girls took a bunch of grapes in her hand and, offering them to him, walked toward him slowly. Her soiled feet shuffled in the dry sand, her frowzy hair hung in knots and snarls, and there were smudges and bruises on her thick legs. She held out the shriveled, rotten grapes to him, and grinned with her fat mouth at him, but revulsion came over him and he retreated toward the sea. There was sadness in her eyes as she threw away the fruit and returned to her sisters.

  Her sisters mocked her and mimicked her. Angry, she seized a stick and hit at them; they rolled away from her, laughing. But out of the corners of their eyes they watched the faun.

  Then the prettiest of them, the slenderest, the cleanest, the most desirable, the freshest, left the others and walked off toward a far point of the sea. And her sisters, pretending not to notice her, started dancing again and singing, and now and then calling to the faun. On his haunches he sat and watched them uneasily; but he would not call back to them, and he would not join them.

  They waved green branches at him, and tossed little shells to him, and called him names, and made faces at him. They joined hands, dancing in a circle round a flower bush.

  The nymph that had left them skirted along the far beach. Then, hidden by the rushes, she entered the water and, knee-deep in the shallow sea, screened by the lush reeds, she waded up behind the faun. And the circle of nymphs, dancing with joined hands, danced slowly closer to him. He crouched there watching them, and he trembled.