At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

  “Bye, dear.” Clio leaned toward her, into the backseat. “See you soon.”

  Katie hesitated, and then shut the door again. “Mom, I’m feeling a little sad.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, I’m thinking over and over about my birth mom leaving me and never seeing me again. And it’s really sad to think when I had to say goodbye to her.” Tears came to her eyes. Clio reached for her, hugged her across the seat, feeling the little shoulders shake. After a few moments Katie sat back, and wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. Clio handed her a tissue. She blew her nose. Again she was quiet, sitting there still, head down. Finally she said, “But every mom has to leave her daughter sometime and never see her again. All moms and dads have to say goodbye to their kids, and their kids to them?”

  “I know, dear. But that’s a long, long time away, and when that time comes, Daddy and I are going to make sure that you’re ready.”

  “You can’t promise that.”

  “No, we can’t. But we’ll try our best. And life has a way of making sure you’re ready. It may sound weird, but it’s true.”

  Katie considered this. “’Kay.” She opened the door again.

  “Hi there,” Mary said to them both, her eyes telling Clio that she knew something was up. Her broad face and even her hair were coated with dirt.

  “How’d you get so muddy?” Katie asked.

  “That horse Velcro! He’s such a brat! Pushed me into a big mudhole!” She laughed, heartily. “A brat, right, Katie?”

  “A real brat, yeah!”

  “C’mon, I need some help.”

  “You got it!” Katie cried happily. “Bye, Mom.”

  “Don’t get too dirty, hon.”

  “Oh Mom!” She rolled her eyes and ran off.

  As Mary went to her house to wash up, Katie walked toward the barn, head down. She kicked resentfully at the yellow, red, and purple leaves in her path. Magically, as if in answer, a whirlwind of leaves spiraled up and around her, riding an unseen breeze. She watched them fly away, free as birds. Like they’re little sads, flying away. She smiled. At the barn, she pulled hard on the weight-balanced door and suddenly she was inside. Smell of hay and moldy stuff and pine needles and dirt and horse poop and goat poop and Velcro and leather and earth like when you turn it up for the plants in spring. I love the smell of earth and pine.

  “Cheep cheep! Cheepcheep! Cheep!”

  She looked up. A barn swallow nest on a crossbeam. Two tiny beaks, three, four! Wide open like pink clamshells waiting for food—babies! I love it here. It feels like home.

  4

  Now Katie stands in the hot sun of the courtyard of the police station, leaning up against Pep. Her mother is staring at her, expecting an answer to her question. Am I all right? Not really. Katie can see the worry in her mother’s eyes, and senses a tension in her father’s body. They are really nervous! For the first time she senses what a big deal it is for them to come back here, and for her too. I think I want to find out about what happened to me, but maybe not. She glances around at all the policemen staring at them, like they’re wondering what I’m doing with these two people who aren’t Chinese, like they think they kidnapped me or something? No way I’m going in there and sit in front of a bunch of policemen who are going to talk about it to them and me.

  “Mom, I’m hot,” she says, adjusting her baseball hat. “Please can I go wait in the bus?”

  “You don’t want to meet the policeman, dear?” Clio asks.

  “Yeah sort of but I don’t, you know, really want to? Like in front of everybody?”

  “Are you sure, sweetie?”

  “Yeah. Can I just wait in the bus and be cool? I mean like cold-cool, not, you know, cool-cool?”

  “Sure, Kate-zer,” Pep says, squeezing her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

  “Just stay in the bus,” Clio says, “till we get back.”

  “I will.” Katie knocks on the door. The driver, cigarette hanging from a corner of his smile, opens the door. Katie gets in and he closes the door behind her.

  

  Pep takes out his camera.

  “No way!” Rhett cries out, and grabs the camera, concealing it quickly under his shirt. “Are you crazy?”

  “No photos?” Pep asks. “Why not?”

  “Because these are the po-leece!” He says it in perfect imitation of Eddie Murphy. “Going to a police station is the last thing—the very last thing—any Chinese wants to do. You never go there voluntarily. And if you’re forced to go there, you do not take pictures of them. They take pictures of you. Jesus!” He lights a cigarette, his hand shaking ominously. Unlike most Chinese they’ve met, Rhett speaks an astonishing brand of English, one you’d hear on the street at home, laced with Afro-American slang. How did he learn it? “From watching American movies,” he said. “A lot of American movies.” What were his favorites? “Dumb and Dumber, and Gladiator, and any Eddie Murphy film. America is great, just great!” Had he ever been there? “No, but if I could, dudes—and little dude Katie—I’m like there, tomorrow?”

  Of all the Chinese they’ve met, Rhett Wong is the only one whom Pep feels has a touch of not exactly cool but of a reach for cool. He is thirty-two, chubby, dressed all in black and gray with aviator sunglasses that never leave his face and a cell phone always in his hand, a cigarette that pops into his fingers at will, and pointy leather shoes that give him, with his bulk above, the appearance of a small dancing bear. “Rhett”? He told them that, at a certain age, an educated Chinese takes a Western name. When it came time for him, his elder brother, at college studying English, was reading Gone With The Wind.

  “A camera?” he goes on. “You wanna take a picture? Let’s just hope they didn’t see it!” His tone implies real danger. Yesterday, at the Changsha airport, when they mentioned the police station, he balked. It was all they could do to convince him, and he said he would require additional “combat pay.”

  “You think, with the camera, I’d be in danger?”

  “Not just you, man, me.”

  “What would happen to you?”

  “You don’t wanna go there.” He puffs, considers. “At best—at the very best—I’m selling beans off a blanket in the street.” He stubs out his butt on the tire of the minibus. “If we’re unlucky, they may already have seen your camera on their cameras. Here.” He sidles up to Pep like a thief selling a stolen Rolex and slips the camera into his hand. “Sneak it back in the bus.”

  “But if they’re watching, won’t they want to see me putting it back in the bus?”

  Rhett stares at him as if he is an idiot. “Pep. Sneak it back in the bus.”

  Pep knocks on the door, and puts the camera on the front seat of the bus.

  “Okay, guys,” Rhett says. “One for all and all for one! We’re goin’ in!”

  Pep looks at Clio and rolls his eyes. She’s glad to connect with him, and rolls her eyes too, and smiles reassuringly. “Ready?” Clio asks.

  “Sure.” Pep has little desire to talk to a Chinese policeman, but he has to be there, not only for marital solidarity but so that, if Clio starts talking about Tibet or Human Rights or the Enslavement of Women or the One-Child-Per-Family Policy, he can step in and avert an international incident.

  

  They walk across the courtyard and in under the overhanging roof to a kind of veranda, a shelter from the dusty heat. Turning left they go through a low doorway and into a small concrete-walled room, another smaller room to their left with a table and three chairs—maybe an interrogation room. Rhett walks to a door in the first room and knocks. He motions Pep and Clio into the interrogation room. The walls are bare but for a poster of the men, ships, and planes of the Chinese army, navy, and air force, in formation beneath a large red star. Through a rectangular hole in one wall they glimpse several men lying on mats on the fl
oor, smoking. Some of the men are only partially in uniform, their ’30s-style undershirts an affront to the image of authority. Pep and Clio sit at the table and wait, listening to Rhett talk to the lounging policemen for what seems a long time.

  Finally in comes a policeman, followed by Rhett. The policeman has a striking head—large, square, framed by a brush cut of black hair. His dark eyes show his suspicion and, because of the reddened sclera, his fatigue or dissipation. As if, Pep muses, he’s been up all night tormenting a suspect and drinking it off the rest of the day in the back room with his buddies. His cheeks are lightly pocked, giving him a tough look, but this doesn’t fit with his lips, which are small and curled and impish. You can see, in the man, the boy, and the boy is not the bully of the class but the astute observer of the bully. Not the gunslinger, but the sidekick. The top two buttons of his uniform shirt are open, revealing a hairless chest. Rhett introduces him—neither Clio nor Pep catches his name but from three weeks in China they are used to never catching names and don’t ask again—and his handshake, like that of most Chinese, is limp. Rhett says he will translate. The chief and Rhett look to Pep for his questions. Pep looks to Clio.

  Clio, on the spot, fingers the smooth jade Kwan Yin on the red thread around her neck that she bought ten years ago at the temple on Mount Yuelu here in Changsha. Jade to dispel ghosts, red thread for luck, Kwan Yin the Chinese bodhisattva of compassion. This helps. As does looking at the kindest part of the chief, his lips, and then looking into his Chinese face as a whole, for this suddenly brings back a warm rush of familiarity—she sees in it the beloved Chinese-ness of her daughter’s face. Ever since Katie was a baby, whenever Clio sees an Asian face, she feels this rush of connection, of affection. After the first three months of staring into her baby’s eyes, one day she went out to shop at the mall and was shocked to realize that it was the Caucasian babies who looked strange—noses too big, faces too custard white, eyes too round, all dull expressions and huge heads on rubbery necks. Assume that he is, at heart, kind. A father of a daughter.

  “Thank you for taking the time to see us. We adopted our daughter from Changsha ten years ago—she’s sitting out there in the bus, the nice air-conditioned bus?” She stops, hoping that this mention of air-conditioning might amuse the chief. Rhett conveys her words. The chief is not amused. “Her documents say that she was brought to Nan Du Lu Police Station. We wanted to find out if there are any records.”

  To Clio, Rhett’s Chinese seems even stranger than usual, filled with clangs and bangs—someone from Beijing told them that the Changsha dialect sounds like a bunch of knives and forks and spoons being jangled around in a cloth bag. Clio is sweating hard. When Rhett finishes, the chief gives a slight smile. When he speaks, his voice reveals vocal chords weathered by many years of barely cured tobacco, an unpaved roadway along which his words jounce and swerve crazily. The chief says that this is a new police station and there are no records from the old police station.

  Clio’s face falls. The chief is still smiling, but the smile is now more malicious than welcoming. He is in charge and there is no question he can’t counter. Clearly this interview, for him, has a low degree of difficulty. “I understand,” she says, “that there are no records of our daughter Katie, but can I ask you about the general policy of the police station in dealing with abandoned babies, with foundlings?”

  The chief nods. Answering Clio’s series of questions and follow-up questions, he seems frank, clear, and matter-of-fact, even bored at telling her the obvious, things of little interest to him. The police get a call from someone who finds a baby where it has been left, almost always in a public place—a railway station bench, a bus station, a busy street corner or park at dawn where the people are gathering to start their tai chi, a busy market, under an overpass where merchants sell things, the front step of a department store. There is even a hole—a kind of ledge in a wall at the entrance to the Martyr’s Park—that is known to be a place where babies can be safely put. The baby is always left where it will be found right away. Whoever finds it knows to call the police. The police go and pick up the baby, bring it back to the police station, make a record of it, take the baby to the orphanage. Each police station has been assigned an orphanage. His is Changsha Social Welfare Center Number One. Katie’s orphanage.

  “Is there ever anything left with the baby when it is found?”

  Sometimes, the chief says, there is a note pinned to the baby’s swaddling clothes, which has the date of birth and the name. Is there ever anything more? Never, says the chief. Never? Clio asks. The chief, with a certain smugness, says maybe once or twice there is a message. What does the message say? The chief shrugs. Can you remember what any of the messages were? Another shrug.

  “Are you saying that you don’t read them or you just don’t care?”

  “Easy does it, Clio,” Pep says, finding himself suddenly drenched in sweat. The chief turns and looks at him, amused at seeing the first fracture of the marital whole. “You don’t have to translate that, Rhett—”

  “Go ahead, Rhett.”

  Rhett glances at Pep, and Pep senses that he also doesn’t want to offend the chief. Smiling, Rhett translates. But before the chief can answer, another policeman walks in. He too is hefty, but not quite as hefty, imposing, but not quite as imposing, and without acknowledging the existence of anyone but the chief he hands two small plastic envelopes to him. The chief opens them—two brass medals suspended from red ribbons. The chief admires the medals, and tucks them into his shirt pocket. The other policeman leaves. As if his receiving these two medals has somehow erased whatever latest pointless question Rhett has asked, the chief sits back and says nothing.

  “What do you do with the notes, the messages?” Clio asks.

  Rhett translates. The chief smiles and makes the gesture of lighting a match and holding it to a piece of paper, watching as it turns to ashes.

  Tears come to Clio’s eyes. Oh God don’t, don’t cry here now! She wipes them away with her hand but they keep coming. All at once on a wave of sorrow she is back in Columbia a dozen years ago, waking up one night beside her husband and feeling crampy in her stomach, no, lower down in her womb! Three months pregnant. After all the anxiety of trying to conceive, all the humiliation of charting her fertile period and calling Pep up wherever he was to come and have sex (not “make love”) right away on demand, and then finally, after six months of failure, getting pregnant and letting herself go, imagining their baby, their child, and feeling suffused with joy—feeling like the Mona Lisa! That one night, waking up beside her husband, not wanting to disturb him, and going to the bathroom and something terrible starting to happen and the cramp becoming a tearing and a loss and she knew it before she looked but she had to. There, in the toilet—the toilet!—a bright red blossoming out from a stringy central bud. Dissolving. Her cry awoke Pep, brought him running—she tried to flush it before he arrived but he saw it too. She never got pregnant again. Years of trying, and never again.

  Dazed by her sudden anguish, she feels Pep’s arm around her shoulders, and she takes the tissue he offers. She focuses on her breath. Gradually calms down. The chief stares at her, a stare she sees as containing all the detached slyness of a skilled interrogator who now knows his victim’s vulnerability. But then all at once she thinks she sees in his eyes his sense of her despair, even a flicker of kindness. At least a lack of cruelty. Which is something. She feels herself soften, and to her surprise she smiles at him. When she goes on her voice is calm.

  “Who are the mothers?”

  The chief seems surprised. “They are either from the country and married, or from the city and single.”

  “Do the mothers ever leave the babies right here at the police station?”

  The chief seems indignant at this, and with a hint of passion says something that Rhett translates as “They can’t. It’s illegal.”

  “But does it happen?”


  “Don’t push him,” Rhett warns.

  “Clio—”

  “Please ask.”

  Rhett asks. The chief stares at Clio, then at Pep, and says nothing.

  “Have you ever had a mother come here looking for her baby?”

  The chief, hearing this, seems amazed, and laughs. He speaks with inordinate slowness, looking at Clio and then at Pep, rather than at Rhett. “No. It’s illegal. It’s all illegal. You don’t understand. These women have a problem. They want to solve their problem. They solve their problem and it is over with, and they go on with their lives. It is a relief. To find them is what you want, not what they want. They don’t want to be found. They don’t think about it, they don’t care about it. It’s over.”

  “They don’t care what happens to their babies?”

  “They don’t care.”

  “But... on their birthdays... these are their little girls—”

  “Look,” the chief says, getting up. “They are in a terrible time in their lives. They are in pain. Some of them kill themselves. They have a problem. We solve their problem. Don’t be selfish.” He smiles, and says, “Thank you for coming to talk.”

  They thank the chief for taking the time and walk out of the tiny rooms onto the veranda, blinded by the sun and heat and dust.

  5

  Clio steps out of the shade of the veranda into the searing heat and walks quickly through what seems like solid yellow dust toward the minibus, searching for Katie. “Where’s Katie? I don’t see her!” Her heart sinks, her ankles go all watery.

  On tip-toe she looks in. Katie is lying down, curled up on the seat, asleep.

  Clio looks up at the damp dusty sky and sends up a prayer of thanks to God, or to the gods. As she brings her eyes back down she sees a puzzling sight. There in a far corner of the courtyard is what looks like a pile of dirty rags, but it’s moving. She walks over, Rhett and Pep following.

  As she gets closer she sees that the rags are human beings. One is a small old Chinese woman with a deeply lined and weather-beaten face, dressed in tattered clothes. She squats on her heels in the dust, staring straight ahead as if she’s blind, one hand out, palm up, begging. The palm is the same color as the rest of her skin, a dirty dark tan. It moves back and forth like a broken-down metronome, pleading. Before her, and tied to her other wrist by a bit of worn twine, is a skinny child, a toddler, still a little wobbly on his feet. The boy walks unsteadily back and forth to the limit of the twine. His face and hands and bare feet are filthy, the same yellow-tan dirt color as the old woman’s. He totters toward Clio and holds out a hand to her—even the palm is filthy. The fingers are thin as pencils, the arm hardly as thick as a broomstick. The old woman, alerted by the sharp tug on the twine, smiles—her teeth are stained almost black by a lifetime of betel chew—and starts talking to them.