Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (43 page)

Jones 112 was the big lecture hall with multi-media capabilities, and when we got there, props and stuff littered the raised lecture platform. Some pipes, a fire extinguisher, a low platform raised about a meter off the ground on two-by-four legs; some big pieces of window glass. In true Brechtian fashion prop men sat on the stage playing cards.

By seven the place was packed, SRO.

The lights went down; there were three thumps on the floor, and lights came back up.

Out came a Chaplin-mustached Arnaud in a modified SA uniform. He wore a silk top-hat with a big silver swastika on the front. He wore a cloak fashioned after one of the ones the Nazis were going to make all truck-drivers wear, back when they were designing uniforms for each profession.

His assistants were a padded-up fat guy with medals all over his chest, and a little thin guy with a rat-nose mask.

First, Hitler hypnotized twenty-two million Germans: he gestured magically at a
découpage
of a large crowd held up by the two guys.

Then they painted Stars of David on the plate glass, and Hitler threw a brick through it.

His assistants came back with a big map of Poland, and he sawed it in half with a ripsaw.

After each trick, he said, “Abracadabra, please and
gesundheit!
”

Then they brought out three chairs, and three people came out on stage and sat down in them.

In the first, a young woman in her twenties. In the second sat a man in his forties, playing on a violin. At the end chair, an old man in his eighties.

Hitler the Magnificent took off his cloak and covered the young woman. “Abracadabra, please and
gesundheit!
” he said, and pulled away the cloak. The chair was empty except for a wisp of smoke drifting toward the ceiling. He put the cape over the violinist, repeated the incantation, and snapped it away. In the chair was the violin and a lampshade with a number on it. He covered the old man, spoke, and raised the cloth. In the chair seat there was now a bar of soap. The thin assistant picked it up and threw it into a nearby goldfish bowl of water. “So light it floats!” he said.

Prop men lit fires along the pipes and pushed them toward Hitler the Magnificent and the two assistants. Surrounded by the closing ring of fire, with a mannequin wearing a brown-blond wig and a wedding dress in his arms, he climbed onto the two-by-four platform, miming great heights, and jumped down next to a wet Luger water pistol, while the fat and thin assistants drank green Kool-Aid from a washtub and fell to the floor.

The stagelights lowered, and the only sound was the
whoosh
of the fire extinguisher putting out the flames on the pipes.

Then the lights came back up.

You could have heard a pin drop. Then—

It wasn’t quite the Paris premiere of
Le Sacre du Printemps
in 1913, but it might as well have been.

You’d think with the whole twentieth century behind us, and a few years of this one, and Mel Brooks’
The Producers
, most of the
oomph
would have gone out of things like this. But you’d be wrong.

I got out the fire exit about the time the firemen and the riot squad came in through it.

He was thrown out, of course, for violations of the University fire codes and firearms policy, for causing a riot, and for unauthorized use of Jones Hall. Plus he spent a couple of days in the city jug before he was expelled.

About a week before that performance, Arnaud had spoken to me for the first and only time. I was in the cafeteria (where we all usually were), alone, between classes, drinking the brown stuff they sell instead of coffee, actually doing some reading in Roman history.

I looked up. Arnaud was standing there, looking like a French foreign exchange student.

“Ever read any Nigidius Figulus?” he asked.

Taken aback by his speaking, I still wanted to appear cool. “Not lately,” I said.

“Should,” he said, and walked away.

That night I got out my handbook of Latin literature. Nigidius Figulus was a neo-Pythagorean of Cicero’s time, an astrologer, a grammarian; much concerned with Fate and the will of the gods. In other words, the usual minor Roman literary jack-of-all-trades the late Republic coughed up as regular as clepsydra-work.

The next day I spent in the Classics library, reading epitomes of his writings.

Not much there for me.

We pulled into the parking lot of the exhibition hall where the circus was, and who do we see but Dr. Fred Luntz getting out of his car with his stepson. Bob called to him. He came over. “Susan call you, too?” asked Dr. Bob.

“No. Why?” asked Fred.

“Arnaud’s in this circus.”

“Arnaud? Arnaud. I’ll be damned.” We went in and sat down on the bleachers.

As circuses got, it was a small one. It only had two mammoths.

Mammontelephants, actually, but you know what I mean.

They were second-billed in the show, too—and they didn’t come in with the Grand Entry Parade. (Dr. Bob noticed immediately. “They usually don’t get along with other elephants,” he said.) Fred’s stepson, about eight, and the product of the previous marriage of his trophy wife, was looking everywhere at once, His name was of course Jason. (In ten years you’ll be able to walk into any crowded bar in America and say “Jason! Brittany!” and fifty people will turn toward you . . . )

We saw Arnaud in the Grand Entry, then in the first walkaround while riggers changed from the high-wire to the trapeze acts; we watched the tumblers, and the monkeys in the cowboy outfits riding the pigs with the strapped-on Brahma bull horns; we ate peanuts and popcorn and Cracker-Jacks and cotton candy. Halfway through, the ringmaster with his wireless microphone said: “Ladeez an Genuhmen, in the center ring [there was only one], presenting Sir Harry Tusker and His Performing Pachyderms, Tantor and Behemoth!”

There were two long low blasts from the entrance doorway, sounds lower than an elephant’s, twice as loud. I felt the hair on my neck stand up.

Walking backwards came Sir Harry Tusker, dressed in pith helmet, safari jacket, jodhpurs, and shiny boots, like old pictures of Frank Buck. In came Tantor and Behemoth—big hairy mounds with tusks and trunks, and tails like hairy afterthoughts. Their trunks were up and curved back double, and each let out a blast again, lower than the first. The band was playing, of course, Lawrence Welk’s “Baby Elephant Walk.”

The crowd applauded them for being
them
; Jason’s eyes were big as saucers.

They went to the center of the ring and you realized just how big they really were, probably not as big as mammoths got (they were both females, of course) but big, bigger than all but the largest bull African elephants. And you’re not used to seeing females with tusks two meters long, either.

They did elephant stuff—standing on their hind legs, their hairy coats swaying like old bathrobes, dancing a little. In the middle of the act a clown came out—it was Arnaud—pushing a ball painted to look like a rock, acting like it weighed a ton, and Behemoth picked it up, and she and Tantor played volleyball while Sir Harry and Arnaud held the net.

It was pretty surreal, seeing hair elephants do that. It was pretty surreal seeing big shaggy elephants the size of Cleveland in the first place.

The show was over too soon for Jason.

At the souvenir booth, Dr. Fred bought him a copy of
The Shaggy Baggy Saggy Mammontelephant
, a Little Golden Book done by a grand-descendant of the author of the original elephant one. It was way below his reading level, but he didn’t mind. He was in heaven while we left word and waited out back for Arnaud.

He showed up, out of makeup, looking about 40, still tall and thin. He shook hands with us like we’d seen each other yesterday.

Jason asked, “Are you really a clown?”

Arnaud looked around, pointed to himself, shook his head no.

“Let’s go get something to eat besides popcorn,” said Dr. Bob. “When do you have to be back?” Arnaud indicated eighteen, a couple of hours.

“Come on,” said Dr. Fred Luntz. “We’re buying.”

Arnaud smiled a big smile.

“It’s all wrong,” said Dr. Fred. “They’re treating them like circus elephants, only shaggy, instead of what they are. The thing with the rock is more like it, if they’re going to have to perform.”

Arnaud was eating from nine or ten plates—two trays—at the cafeteria a kilometer or so from the exhibition hall. The four of us had only eaten a couple of pieces of pie, jello salads, and some watermelon because we were so full of circus junk food. Arnaud’s metabolism must have been like a furnace. Occasionally he would look up from eating.

“Better that, than them not being around at all,” said Dr. Bob.

“Well, yes, of course. But, Sir Harry Tusker. African white-hunter archetype. All wrong for mammoths.”

“Yeah, well, what do you want? Siberians? Proto-Native Americans?” asked Bob.

“I mean, there was enough grief twenty or so years ago, when they were first brought back—the Russians tried taking frozen mammoth genes from carcasses in the permafrost late last century, putting them in Indian elephants, their nearest living relatives—”

“This is your friend, Dr. Bob, the paleonologist, Fred . . . ” said Dr. Bob.

“Okay. Okay. But didn’t work last century. Suddenly, it works. Exact same procedure. Suddenly, we have mammontelephants, all female of course. Big outrage; you can’t bring back extinct animals to a time they’re not suited for; it’s cruel, etc. Like the A-Bomb and physicists; geneticists
could
bring back the dead, so they
did
. Or purt-near, anyway. So we give in. They’re in zoos at first, then circuses. Ten, twenty, thirty at first, now maybe one hundred, two hundred—only a few are in the game preserves in Siberia run by the World Wildlife Fund and the Jersey Zoo (and there was a big fight about
that
). Then five years ago, hey presto! There’s males. Someone went into a male completely buried in the frozen ground and retrieved the whole system (and how’s you like
that
for a job, huh, Bob?) and then we have viable sperm, and now there are five or six males, including the one up in Baltimore, and more on the way. What I’m saying is, turn ’em loose somewhere, don’t just look at them, or make ’em act.”

“Like loose where? Like do what?” asked Bob.

“Like, I don’t know,” said Dr. Fred.

Arnaud continued shoveling food into his face.

“What did you think about the mammoths, Jason?” I asked him.

“Neat!” he said.

“Me too,” I said.

“Look, you know as well as I do what the real reason people want to shut all this down is,” said Dr. Bob. “It’s not that they don’t want extinct animals brought back into a changed climate, that they have an inability to adapt from an Ice Age climate—you go up or down in altitude and get the climate you want. Mammoths in the high Rockies, in Alaska, in Siberia. Sure, no problem. And it ain’t, like they
say
, that we should be saving things that are going extinct now first: they’re still here, they’ll have to be taken somewhere to live, and people will have to leave them alone—island birds, rare predators, all that. That’s their big
other
argument: Fix now
now
, then fix
then
. The real reason is the same since the beginning: we’re playing God, and they don’t like it.”

“Sure it has a religious element,” said Fred. “But that doesn’t mean you have to put the mammontelephants in some sort of zoo and circus limbo while you decide if there’s to be more of them or not. Nobody’s advocating bringing back
smilodons
(even if you could find the genetic material), or dinosaurs if you want to go the mosquito-in-amber wild goose chase. This comes down to questions of pure science—”

“If we can, we have to?”

“You’re talking like the people who don’t want them—or the two wooly rhinos—back,” said Fred.

“No, I’m giving you their argument, like people give me. They’re here because we couldn’t stop ourselves from bringing them
back
, any more than we could stop ourselves from killing them
off
in the first place. Where was the religion in that?”

I was looking back and forth. I was sure they’d had this discussion before, but never in front of me. Arnaud was eating. Jason was reading his book for the tenth time.

Arnaud looked at the two docs as he finished the last of everything, including a pie crust off Fred’s plate.

“Plenty religion involved,” said Arnaud. “People just don’t understand the
mammoths
.”

Fred and Bob looked at him.

“Yeah?” asked Bob.

“They let me know,” said Arnaud. He patted his stomach and nodded toward the door.

As we let him off at the circus, he reached in his shirt pocket and handed Jason six long black hairs, making a motion with his left arm hanging off his nose and his right forming a curve in front of him.

“Mammoth hair! Oh boy oh boy!” said Jason.

Then Arnaud pointed to Dr. Bob and made the signal from the sixty-year-old TV show
The Prisoner
—Be Seeing You.

That night I read about mammontelephants. The first were cloned less than thirty years ago, and there were some surprises. The normal gestation period for the Indian elephant is twenty-two months; for the mammontelephants it was closer to eighteen. The tusks of Indian elephant cows normally stick out less than twenty centimeters from their mouths; that of the mammontelephants two, two-and-a-half meters and still growing. (What the tusks of the males, all six or seven of them in the world, will be, no one knows yet, as the first is only six years old now—it’s guessed they could grow as long as those of fossil true bull mammoths.) Their trumpeting, as I said, is lower, deeper, and creepier than either Indian or African elephants (a separate species). It’s assumed they communicate over long distances with subsonic rumbles like their relatives. They have developed the fatty humps on their heads and above their shoulders, even though most aren’t in really cold climates. Yes, they have the butt-flap that keeps the wind out in cold weather. The big black long guard hairs (like the ones Arnaud gave Jason) are scattered over the thick underfur, itself forty centimeters thick. Further clonings—with twelve- and thirteen-year-old mammontelephants carrying baby mammontelephants to term—has speeded up the process: most elephants don’t reproduce until they’re fifteen or so. And you get a more mammoth mammontelephant. What will happen when Mr. and Ms. Mammontelephant get together in another six or seven years? They might not like each other. That’s where Science will come in again . . .