The Circus Animals’ Conscription is a volume of so-called ‘popular history,’ delving into the ecological destruction caused in Africa and Asia by the practices of the British circus industry in the Nineteenth Century. It appeared in print last year, published and promoted by a well-known press with offices in New York, London, Majorca and Tel Aviv. Its author is one Robert Phyllis-Darcy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin who seems to be wearing dentures in his author’s photo. Or else his teeth are eerily white and large. He is also unreasonably tanned, and the choice of a cravat over a necktie is misguided and deeply unsettling. The Circus Animals’ Conscription was reviewed favourably in the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as well-researched and lucid and occasionally heart-breaking, whereas it is clear to any sane and competent reader that the book’s title is of course an arrogant and undeserving nod to Yeats’ masterpiece ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, from which our language acquires the troubling yet nearly perfect idiom “the raving slut who keeps the till.” Phyllis-Darcy’s work is unworthy of its appellation.

The author of this affidavit had once written to Phyllis-Darcy in a state of pure jest, which has since been legally misinterpreted as genuine malice and a form of premeditation.  

Dear Professor,

I am going to fight you, and I want it recorded in the press as a fair contest between two naked, divinely-appointed brawlers.

Verily, I am pissed off since reading in the Times that you have successfully stolen The Circus Animals’ Conscription from me. That was going to be the title of my first novel, a racy affair with tennis, murder, and cunnilingus. But I’ve had a bastard of a time finishing it because I am a lazy arborist with an ongoing drinking problem and it’s also possible I am in love.

But here’s some of it, the novel in progress, written evidence that I am not a liar. Not trying to cheat you. I am an honourable person. I don’t go around this country like some wraith or imposter or limitless buffoon stealing other men’s titles.

Dear Professor,

I am going to fight you and I want it recorded in the press as a fair contest between two naked, divinely-appointed brawlers.

Verily, I am pissed off since reading in the Times that you have successfully stolen The Circus Animals’ Conscription from me. That was going to be the title of my first novel, a racy affair with tennis, murder, and cunnilingus. But I’ve had a bastard of a time finishing it because I am a lazy arborist with an ongoing drinking problem and it’s  also possible I am in love.

But here’s some of it, the novel in progress, written evidence that I am not a liar. Not trying to cheat you. I am an honorable person. I don’t go around this country like some wraith or imposter or limitless buffoon stealing other men’s titles.

“Tennis Anyone?” Gage asked the other members of the quartet.

Josephine was vomiting in the rosebushes from too much vodka. Teddy had been after the Great Dane, to examine its genitals as a matter of comparison. Julia was up on the roof with a pole saw, tending to the soft-wooded Magnolia, what she believed to be a Magnolia, but the arborist had refused to tell her outright, first demanding he be paid finally for taking down the elm and walnut the previous winter. Attorneys had become involved, and Julia had acquired a certain reputation throughout the neighbourhood as cheap and hostile, which she did not deny.

“Tennis anyone?” Gage repeated himself.

“You’re not dressed,” Julia shouted back to him.

This was true. Gage wore a tuxedo at Julia’s insistence, and Julia was actually naked save for a blacksmith’s apron. Josephine was fixing a warm martini, mostly gin and a splash of vermouth. The bar cart had been sitting out in the sun all morning, gathering dust and heat. Teddy had cornered the Great Dane and calmed him with song. “Why, it’s no bigger than mine,” Teddy sang.

“Josephine, you liar,” Teddy said in a normal voice as he turned back to Josephine.

“Teddy, darling. That I wish you had the temerity of an animal. That you would go down on me on a fixed weekly schedule. That you not qualify and delay our lovemaking until, ‘after the taxes have been filed, dear, after the children are away at summer camp, after you’ve washed off the scent of Leopold, the ice sculptor, to whom you made love in a bath of Beluga caviar.’”

“I can’t believe you, Josephine! Leopold is my friend. When David Bowie died and I was sad, he brought over a bottle of scotch and said, ‘help you drink it down to the label if you like.’ He had class. And he taught me that old expression about Michelangelo, that the marble trembled before him as he approached his workshop.”

“I tremble before Leopold,” said Josephine.

“What an obvious sentiment!” Julia cried from the rooftop. “What an obvious goddamn thing to say, Josephine, you stupid bitch!”

Gage knew then that there would be no tennis that long weekend, not until he shot Leopold dead. Gage fastened his dinner jacket and took the martini out of Josephine’s hands. He raised his glass in a toast: “I will bring the ring to Mordor, though I confess I do not know the way.” He gulped down the martini and then went to find his gun and address book. Josephine was incredulous and began fixing another drink. Teddy wrestled with the Great Dane. Julia worked the pole saw, imagining the tree to be a giant squid attacking The Nautilus.

But later, standing over Leopold’s body, wiping the gun, pondering the suicide note he would have to forge, its many apologies and grim accusations, planning his alibi at the Chinese restaurant, Gage paused and frowned and worried about his nonexistent second serve and weak, defensive backhand. Leopold, as it turns out, may have died for nothing as Gage now preferred the idea of swimming laps to the atrocity of tennis.

Yes, swimming would do quite nicely, Gage thought as he slipped out of Leopold’s kimono.

In the world before the fall, I could exist and even thrive without women. They have all taken their toll on me but especially Josephine, thoroughly modern Josephine from a small town near Tuscaloosa, an empress in her own right. I find it difficult to work without her and I spend every waking hour hoping she will appear in the doorway with a sack of fruit, a loaf of bread, wine and the splendour of her perfect, equestrian body. I’ve said prayers, spoken to God, explained to the alms-givers the crisis of my own dissolution for the want of pure Josephine. Where is Josephine? Where does she loiter and whom does she pursue? Not me. Not here where the shadows fall, and the river runs past.

But where is Josephine? It seems she prefers the theatricality of her tenuous marriage and the dull simplicity of her children. We drugged them with barbiturates on a Saturday afternoon so we could speak candidly and make love and then argue listlessly about whose turn it was to fashion the cocktails we had discovered last year in San Juan. When the children woke up they were unquestioningly stupid, and Josephine took them for ice cream. The smaller one had sniffed out the new, corrupted air of grenadine and gin and dead leaves once or twice, but said nothing and shrugged with unpractised indifference. Later, Josephine called me from an ice cream parlour to say she would not leave her husband. She would not come stay with me. Here she could have drank and read books, all of them. She could have sauntered around the place in a silk kimono or crawled naked across the floors, mewling like a jaguar in heat. We had plans for an outdoor shower and a secluded pavilion upon which to dry, as if we were handmaidens returning from bathing in the Nile. In fact, I rented a masonry saw and the details of the rental and deposit are enclosed. With as much love and grace as I can muster at this dark hour, with apologies to your husband, who is a gentleman and simply the victim of fate, with earnest hopes of seeing you again through the mist of some distant nebula, and lacking the certitude of a saint, a General Tecumseh Sherman, or a downhill skier, I say farewell, Josephine. Farewell my love, my temple harlot and civilizing force, and take the best possible care of yourself.

But when Gage returned home from the Chinese buffet, where he had noisily complained about the Crab Rangoon being cold, drawing the attention of everyone in the restaurant, Julia, Teddy and Josephine were dressed for tennis. “Tennis anyone?” Julia asked as she curtsied dementedly.

“Think I’d like to swim,” Gage tried.

“Goddammit, Gage. You were so insistent and theatrical. Going off with your revolver to play Russian Roulette! Not that you have the courage. Where were you hiding?” Julia said in protest.

Gage could do nothing but relent. He dressed for tennis. He and Julia faced Teddy and Josephine. They played under the Duke of Torquay rules, which meant no hard liquor was allowed on the court. Gage flailed and drank himself stupid on Budweiser and Riesling. He and Julia lost in consecutive sets. Julia was a poor loser and turned her racquet on Gage’s backside until it was red and bloodied, and she kept screaming at him, “You don’t think it could be worse?! It could be so much worse, sweetheart, mi amor!”

Julia, Josephine and Teddy left Gage weeping on the court. Teddy made love to Josephine in the hot tub while Julia watched from above and tended the soft-wooded magnolia, what she had decided was indeed magnolia, to hell with the arborist and his attorneys.

And scene! Exeunt. Acta est fabula, plaudite.  Obviously—well it is obvious to me—that Gage is a Christlike figure of the first water. Having survived his crucifixion, Jesus Christ went to India in the first century AD, to Kashmir, where he died a half-century later from old age in the robust arms of a child-bride. Similarly, Gage will leave Julia and travel the contiguous United States in a diesel pick-up truck, righting wrongs, committing necessary electoral fraud and slaying strange, right on the banks of the Mississippi.

I have been told by a man I held at knifepoint on a footbridge at dusk in Paris, Texas that my novel sounds “promising.” As such, I demand you relinquish The Circus Animals’ Conscription immediately. Contact your publisher and have them recall and pulp all copies issued under this title. Please find it in your tortured, brutal heart to be gracious about this shit.

Very Sincerely,

Avee Chaudhuri

The author never received a reply to his letter. For a time, he drank inconsolably and listened to records and cooked breakfast tacos, all day long and well into evening. He pulled out the yews in his front garden, what were intended to form a hedgerow to ensure his privacy as he worked in his office. But the author decided he had no need for privacy, since he never worked on the novel, because what was the point? So the author drank and pulled out the yews with his diesel pick-up truck and a tow strap while listening to Country and Western music. Then he planted basil because in lieu of writing a novel he was going to make pesto for the few people whose company he enjoyed. That, he decided, would be his lasting contribution to the world. The pesto was universally reviled. He had added ground espresso beans for some reason, and an ounce of dark chocolate. His friend the sculptor, whom he secretly loved, told him outright it was terrible.

“Too much salt,” she said as she reached for a glass of wine.

“I can learn,” the author said.

“Maybe cooking isn’t for you.”

“It’s all I have. It’s all I can do now.”

“Listen, why aren’t you writing?” she asked.

“They’ve plagiarized me. Successfully.”

The sculptor poured him some wine. She sighed and smiled and said, “Dammit, it’s like Churchill remarked after Dunkirk, the little boats: ‘Looks like we got ourselves a ball game.’ Or maybe that was Hitler. Anyways, you ought to give these fuckers the business.”

He did love her. He loved her intensely, he decided.  So he threw out the pesto and dug up and destroyed the basil in a well-managed fire. Knowing he wanted to present a striking image, he began to exercise five hours a day and go to the sauna. In the sauna he sat and practiced his elocution. He had his teeth whitened and bought a new suit made from Italian wool. He marched to the sculptor’s house, a good three and half mile distance, stopping at each bar along the way for a Pernod and a glass of Miller High Life. When he arrived at her house, he was very drunk and said to her: “I will take the ring to Mordor, and I do happen to know the way, because I have left the shire of the imagination enough times to realize that frankly your body art is atrocious and socially divisive, in a good way, in the best of ways, like Brutalist architecture, and I want to live inside you as one does a tower block in East London, a full life of scotch bonnets and dissonant electronic music.”

And in that moment, he felt the clouds part and the children rejoice. The wind calmed itself and warring tribes around the world threw down their guns and burial spades and embraced one another in the spirit of radical innocence. Animals once thought of as tricksters, as fundamentally indifferent to human affairs, the rabbit, the coyote, the fox, offered up to him and his new bride a bouquet of wildflowers and a rain barrel of gin. The sun was bright. The day was warm and pleasant. The sculptor collapsed into the author’s arms and said to him: “take me to bed.” And there they made love tenderly, then rested, then screwed ardently for a change of pace. And they continued in this way, cycling through the modes of intercourse for the rest of their life together, while raising children and growing vegetables and building a greenhouse from which to escape the children. Or so the author had hoped.

But the sculptor was not amused. She did not like being compared to public housing by someone who was barely able to stand upright in her doorway, this ludicrous person who was vomiting profusely and wiping his mouth on the wainscoting.

“What a goddamn presumptuous, drunken thing to say. What an ugly fucking forward way of being,” she said before slamming the door in his face.

And so the author gathered himself and began the arduous journey home on foot, stopping at each bar along the way for a Coors Banquet and a shot of whiskey. A young Southern belle pitied the author’s funereal air, the morbid glamor of his disenchantment, and took him to her third-floor apartment. She wanted to live recklessly and asked the author to make love to her.

“Take me to bed,” she said. But at this point he’d had too much to drink so he went home.

The author drove the 700 miles to Wisconsin in under ten hours, and called on Professor Phyllis-Darcy at his home, pretending to be an avid reader of his work. The author, of disputed racial heritage, introduced himself in a splendid and gallant fashion as Ignacio Chakravorty, First Marquess of Gibraltar.

Phyllis-Darcy lived on an old hunting estate outside Madison. He had converted the grounds into a kind of Restoration-era paradise, with hedge mazes, Classical sculptures and grass tennis courts.

After Phyllis-Darcy’s body was found, the police interviewed the author at his motel. He claims that he left Phyllis-Darcy alive and in good health, but that his wife seemed to be “sexually envious” of the author. The author had complimented Phyllis-Darcy on his powerful and attractive lower body, and in response Phyllis-Darcy suggested a stroll through his elaborate hedge maze. “Oh we could be lost for hours,” said Phyllis-Darcy. The author accepted the invitation, and Phyllis-Darcy brusquely ordered his wife to clear the dinner table and to prepare coffee and liqueur for their eventual return. During his second interview, at police headquarters, the author suggested to the detectives that Phyllis-Darcy’s wife murdered her husband, and wished to make clear that his comments about Phyllis-Darcy’s physique were purely intended to ingratiate himself to the historian.

However, an eyewitness has come forward, one of Phyllis-Darcy’s Welsh landscapers. He claims to have overheard the author and Phyllis-Darcy speaking about tennis:

“Do you play?” Phyllis-Darcy asked the author.

“I have a non-existent second serve, and a weak, defensive backhand,” the author replied, allegedly.

“Well, let’s have a game.”

“Only if there’s something riding on it.”

“Indeed. What shall our wager be?”

“The title of you newest book.”

“What?”

“I want that title, goddammit!” the author screamed, according to the gardener, who is a fantasist and probably in love with Mrs. Phyllis-Darcy—the real killer.

“My God! It’s you. You’re that lunatic who wrote to me.”

The gardener claims that the author then attacked Phyllis-Darcy with a stone bust of Medusa as he repeatedly shouted, “Relent!”

As an impanelled member of the jury, you know of course the author is currently in jail awaiting the outcome of his trial for murder. He maintains his innocence. He disparages the logic that if a man hates and resents another man this leads inevitably to murder. He goes on rambling about civility. He says again and again to the prison chaplain, a sympathetic Jesuit, that he is being framed for murder by Mrs. Phyllis-Darcy, who reclined naked on the chaise-lounge for him when he returned from the gardens in search of the promised coffee and liqueurs. Specifically he was in the mood for Sambuca. 

“It would be trite for us to bang, as I resent your husband and he treats you poorly,” the author told Mrs. Phyllis-Darcy, who sighed and got dressed.

“Why don’t you just admit you’re impotent. Stop hiding behind your aesthetic code.” said Mrs. Phyllis-Darcy later at the wet bar. She and the author were having Sambuca and black coffee. She wore a silk kimono.

“Where does your husband keep his tennis racquets?” the author asked.

Mrs. Phyllis-Darcy retrieved a tennis racquet and at the author’s insistence started pummeling him on the backside, referring to him as “a failure of a son, and as useless as cake frosting on a badger’s ass.” Within seconds, the author had a physically sound, stable erection which he laid evenly across the bar. And then he dressed, retrieving from the armoire one of Mr. Phyllis-Darcy’s finer tweed suits. Mrs. Phyllis-Darcy is a handsome woman, like Jocasta or Elizabeth Woodville. In another time she could have moved the destiny of nations and city-states, and so the author celebrated his restraint by getting drunk at the nearby Chili’s Bar and Grill.

The author is innocent of all charges. He confronted Professor Phyllis-Darcy, but not in the violent manner alleged. He simply told the Professor that he pitied him for his lack of good manners and that his calves were too vascular and therefore unsightly. The Professor rubbed his legs in a self-conscious manner, cried out “My god, he’s right!” and then fell to the ground, weeping hysterically in the foetal position. The author then went in search of an after-dinner refreshment.

I repeat, the author is innocent. To cope with his ordeal, he has started writing a trashy science fiction novel about a blonde buxom Oxford-trained scientist who discovers the lost nation of Atlantis. In the course of doing so she participates in frequent orgies with the mer-people, within a specially-designed hyperbaric chamber lined with suede and synthetic animal fur. To this sophomoric tale he has also appended the title The Circus Animals’ Conscription, in brutal defiance of the historian’s ghost and widow.

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Avee Chaudhuri teaches literature at a midwestern university. Twitter: @indigojackal