Perhaps I should start "When he was twelve, he ran away from the circus."

Maybe I should begin "As circuses go, it was a small one. It only had two mammoths."

I'll just start at the beginning: The phone rang.

"Was the Pope Polish?" I asked.

"Well, the circus is in town, and he's in it. Susie Neruda took her nieces and nephews yesterday and recognized him. She just called me." Then he paused. "You want to go see him?"

"I didn't think you and circuses got along," I said.

"For this, I'll ignore everything in my peripheral vision."

"When would you like to go?"

"Next show's in forty-five minutes. I'll swing by and pick you up."

"Uh, sure," I said, looking at the stack of departmental memos on my desk. I threw the antimacassar from the back of my office chair over them.

He hung up.

"Soon you'll be studying them," I said to Dr. Bob, pointing.

"Oh," he said. "Dinosaurs. Très amusant."

It was while we were all—me, Dr. Bob, our colleague Dr. Fred Luntz the archaeologist, Susie Neruda (née Baxter)—undergraduates here, at this podunk branch of the North Carolina state university, just after the turn of the millennium, that Arnaud showed up. We assumed he was French, maybe Belgian or Swiss, we didn't know, because he didn't talk. Much, anyway. He had that Jacques Tati-Marcel Marceau-Fernandel body type, tall and thin, like he'd been raised in a drainpipe. He was in the drama department; before we knew him, we knew of him.

About half the time we saw him, he was in some form of clown déshabille or mime getup. We assumed it was for the acting classes, but a grad student over there said no, he just showed up like that, some days.

"I don't think so, or she would have. I'm assuming he mostly puts out fires inefficiently and throws pies with accuracy, unless circuses have changed a great deal since my time."

It was in November, his first semester, and he was out on the east mall passing out flyers, in full regalia: a polka-dot clown suit, clownwhite, bald headpiece, a hat the size of a fifty-cent flowerpot. He had a Harpo bulbhorn he honked as people came by.

The flyer said:

Well, uh-oh.

It wasn't sorcery, but it was transformative: it transformed him right out of college. To say that it wasn't well received is bending the language.

Jones 112 was the big lecture hall with multimedia 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 on 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.

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.

"No. Why?" asked Fred.

"Arnaud's in this circus."

"Arnaud? Arnaud. I'll be damned." We went in and sat down on the bleachers.

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. ...)

There were two long low blasts form 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 hairy elephants do that. It was pretty surreal seeing big shaggy elephants the size of Cleveland in the first place.

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 forty, 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.